Asian Quake Disrupts Data Traffic

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By Seth Mydans, International Herald Tribune  |  December 28, 2006

BANGKOK -- It was a tsunami for the digital age, a collapse of the virtual world that radiated through much of Asia and beyond.

After an earthquake off the southern coast of Taiwan, people woke yesterday to find themselves without e-mail messages or the Internet and, in some cases, without telephone connections, cut off from the rest of the world.

The earthquake, which struck late Tuesday, ruptured two of the undersea cables that are part of a communications system that circles the globe. Coming on the second anniversary of the Asian tsunami that took 230,000 lives, it was a reminder of the world's increasing dependence on communications technology.

Two residents were killed and more than 40 were injured in the tremor, registering 6.7 in Richter-scale magnitude, that hit offshore, near the southern Taiwanese town of Hengchun.

As many as a dozen fiber-optic cables cross the ocean floor south of Taiwan, carrying traffic through China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the United States, and the island itself. Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan's largest phone company, said that the quake damaged several of them, and that repairs may take two to three weeks.

Taiwan lost almost all of its telephone capacity to Japan and mainland China. Service to the United States also was hard hit, with 60 percent of capacity lost.

Later yesterday, Chunghwa said that connections to the United States, China, and Canada had been mostly restored, but that 70 percent of the capacity to Japan was still down, as was 90 percent of the capacity to Southeast Asia.

Financial companies and technology services suffered most directly. Banking and securities trading were all but paralyzed. Operations from travel agencies to newspapers to schools struggled.

"You don't realize until you miss it how much you rely heavily on technology," said Andrew Clarke, a sales trader in Hong Kong. "Stuff you took for granted has been taken away and you realize, ah, back to the old way, using mobiles."

"I'm completely dependent on the Internet," said Robert Halliday, an American writer based in Bangkok. "If the Internet goes down for half a day, people can just stay in bed in terms of getting any work done."

Yesterday, he was stymied in trying to get information for a review he was writing of a Romanian DVD. Just a few years ago, such a review could have meant several hours in a library.

In the United States, Cisco Systems Inc.'s Linksys unit warned that customer support call centers for its home networking gear had been affected, but that other companies with overseas call centers had reported few problems.

Tyco International Ltd. said its cable-laying ship, based in Taiwan, was heading to the area for repairs. "Pretty much everything south of Taiwan has been reported at fault," said Frank Cuccio, vice president of marine services at the Tyco Telecommunications unit, based in Morristown, N.J.

Many Asian enterprises found that they could barely function without the Internet.

In Beijing, Wang Yifei, an independent television producer, sent telephone messages when her Internet connection was down.

"I've been complaining about this all day," she said. "This high-tech world of ours. It didn't happen in the old days."

In Hong Kong, Niall Phelan, the creative director of APV, a media production company based there, said he usually received about 300 e-mail messages a day. Yesterday, he said, he got none.

Without e-mail, he was back to the old-fashioned way of communicating, by telephone.

In Manila, Abe Olandres, who owns and runs a Internet-hosting company, just about gave up. He said he planned to try a Wi-Fi hot spot in a coffee shop after struggling at the office all day. "This is killing me," he said.

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SEOUL, South Korea--Telecommunications across Asia were disrupted on Wednesday after an earthquake off Taiwan damaged undersea cables, jamming Internet services as voice and data traffic vied for space on smaller cables and slower satellite links.

The quake disrupted services in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, but a ripple effect was felt in other parts of the world. Many phone subscribers could not get through to Europe, regional telecommunications operators reported, as they raced to reroute their traffic to alternative lanes.

"We are seeing really massive outages in a spread of countries in East and Southeast Asia,"said Todd Underwood, chief operations and security officer at the Internet monitoring firm Renesys. "This is a much broader effect than you see in most natural disasters."

Financial companies and businesses in the region were hit hard, as online banking and communications between financial markets and traders were affected. The stock exchanges in Tokyo and Hong Kong said they were working without problems, and traders found ways to complete their transactions.

The earthquake, which Taiwan authorities said registered a magnitude of 6.7, struck off the island's southern tip Tuesday evening. Several major cables were cut, according to telecommunications executives, including the Asia Pacific Cable Network, which links North and Southeast Asia, and the SEA-ME-WE-2 link, which stretches from South Korea around the Eurasian land mass to the Netherlands.

Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's largest phone company, said that the quake had damaged two undersea cables off the Taiwan coast. The lines route calls and process Internet traffic for several Asian countries. China Telecom, China's biggest fixed-line telephone operator, said that the earthquake had affected lines "from the Chinese mainland to places including the Taiwan area, the United States and Europe, and many have been cut." It also reported serious damage to Internet connections.

PCCW, Hong Kong's main fixed-line telecommunications provider, said that several of its partly owned submarine cables had been damaged. With its data capacity reduced by half, PCCW cautioned that some Internet users in the region could experience congestion over the next several days. Both Singapore Telecommunications, Southeast Asia's top phone company, and its local rival, StarHub, reported slow access to Internet pages.

Mr. Underwood said that after the earthquake struck, 3,000 Asian networks disappeared entirely from his company's tracking equipment. By comparison, 5,000 networks disappeared during the blackout of 2003 in the Northeast United States, he said.

Networks in the United States and Europe were not affected. However, many companies with subsidiaries, partners or manufacturers in Asia are finding their communications disrupted.

"The reality is the Internet is a global network, and it is fairly rare to find large organizations that don't do a significant amount of traffic to Asia,"Mr. Underwood said.

Experts in Taiwan and elsewhere said that repairs to undersea cables could take weeks, raising fears of more communications difficulties in Taiwan, the fifth-largest economy in Asia, and of more telephone and Internet problems in the region.

"This is a major event, and it's not going to get fixed fast,"Mr. Underwood said. "These cables are underwater. You have to get boats in place, they have to drag the cables until they find the break. The good news is that during earthquakes the breaks tend to happen close to land and are not really that deep. But the last underwater cable outage took six weeks to fix."

Analysts said it was fortunate that the breakdown occurred during the relatively quiet holiday period, with business activity light and markets mostly quiet. Such an interruption during an ordinary week could have had catastrophic impact on regional businesses, especially financial markets.

Still, many securities traders in Hong Kong and Singapore were unable to obtain prices and complete orders because networks linking financial companies were disrupted. Dealers in the region said they have had difficulties accessing international news providers for information. They also reported that customers using the Internet for prices complained that they could not look up stock prices online.

That Internet traffic out of Southeast Asia was not cut off entirely was testimony to the progress made in recent years in adding capacity along new routes, executives said. But they said that most information sought by global Internet users remains in the United States, and Asia is linked to that information by only a handful of relatively fragile cables that are subject to forces on the ocean floor. Information can be transmitted by satellite, but it is slower and more expensive than sending it over cables.

"We do need these submarine cables,"said Paul Budde, an analyst in Sydney. "Satellite is not really an alternative for the heavy traffic. For the bulk, you do need these fat cables."

But most of Asia is separated by water, meaning data must be carried by undersea cables that rest on the seabed up to 8 kilometers, or 5 miles, below the surface. Building such submarine cables is an expensive undertaking. By one estimate, it costs up to $500,000 a kilometer to lay undersea cables. As a result, most cables are owned by consortiums of telecommunications companies, which create joint pricing and share the cost of building and repairing the cables.

As recently as a decade ago, Asia was connected to the United States by only five cables, all through Japan. The dot-com boom ushered in a period of rapid expansion, and cables now connect Australia, China and South Korea directly to the United States.

In an attempt to add even more capacity to meet growing demand in Asia, Verizon Communications announced last week that it was joining with three Chinese carriers, a Taiwanese carrier and a South Korean carrier to build the Trans-Pacific Express, a $500 million, 18,000-kilometer network in the region.

That will help telecommunications companies in the future, but their most immediate task is finding alternatives for delivering their customers' information until the undersea cables can be repaired.

KDDI, Japan's major carrier for international calls, whose communications along undersea cables out of Japan went through Taiwan before reaching Southeast Asia and beyond, said that the use of alternative lines would limit the possibility of a complete breakdown in communications.

In Seoul, the KT Corporation, South Korea's leading fixed-line and broadband service provider, rerouted ordinary telephone calls and data traffic, said Yeom Woo Jong, a KT spokesman.

"This incident reminds telecommunications companies like us of the importance of acquiring alternative lines,"Mr. Yeom said, "to ensure undisrupted services during an emergency. It means investment and more cost."