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.

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 eight kilometers, or five 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.”

source: www.nytimes.com

Content navigation