Earthquake Hits Asia Communications
The recent earthquake near Taiwan has had a major impact on Internet communications in the SE Asia region. While in Singapore for the holidays, access this morning was so poor on SingTel DSL, that over half of visited sites timed out, and most others were too slow to be functional. From CNN:
Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom said two of four major undersea cables out of Taiwan had been affected. Voice circuits had been reduced to 40 per cent of capacity to the United States and just 2 per cent to most parts of Southeast Asia.
PCCW, Hong Kong’s main fixed-line telecoms provider, said several undersea cables it part-owned had been damaged. “Data transfer is down by half,” a spokeswoman said.
Both Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), Southeast Asia’s top phone company, and local rival StarHub Ltd., said customers were suffering slow access to Internet pages.
It’s amazing how fragile the Internet is in this part of the Pacific rim, even for the first-world locales above. We’ve become so dependent on it, that nearly everyone I’ve talked to has been affected.
This will possibly prevent my participation in the WikipediaWeekly podcast, where we use Skype to conference in all the panelists.
December 27th, 2006 16:19
The network at Beihang is so bad anyway that I didn’t even notice a difference.
February 16th, 2007 09:11
Yeh jsut because the earthquake blacked out internet doesn’t make much of a difference to us. Why don’t you tell people about what happened happened. Like the earhquake scale or something.
February 16th, 2007 09:12
what about everything else that happens in asia.
October 5th, 2008 22:53
[…] Southeast Asia is still dealing with the technical aftershocks of the Taiwan earthquake, with Internet access in Singapore slightly better than yesterday. From Singapore’s ChannelNewsAsia: Taiwan’s largest phone company Chung-hwa Telecom said the quake which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale disrupted some 98% of Taiwan’s communications capacity with Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong. […]