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.

Due to the high cost of such submarine cables, most countries co-invest in a common communications infrastructure, and this multi-billion-dollar information superhighway has now been damaged.

The earthquake was so massive that even SingTel’s backup alternative cables were knocked out.

Some recent experiences:

• Since you’re reading this post, you can see host provider Dreamhost has been quite good, but some connection-oriented services like secure shell have not worked well.
• Google is very hard or impossible to access via Singtel and others. Search front page does not even bring up partial content, and Google Mail has been unreachable for over 24 hours. However, access to Yahoo’s search page is lightning fast.
• Skype voice calls from here were very poor yesterday. A call to the “echo123” test user last night was largely gibberish with packet loss of greater than 50%, probably due to congestion on what channels are left. Today, on a Skype video call to the US, it took a few tries to get a connection down to 20% packet loss. Even with that high loss rate, the audio/video was still very usable. Kudos to Skype for having a codec and transport that survives these conditions.
• Reports from friends in China say that PRC’s already “nonspeedy” connections have felt sluggish.

This is a counterpoint to the “death of distance” meme. In these situations, there is a benefit of having an email service provider near you geographically. (I’ve been out of luck accessing US-based Gmail).

With expanses of water separating countries around the Rim of Fire, the region will need to come up with more innovative and robust backup plans. After the South Asia tsunami, satellite communication was the solid backup for voice communication. But those “pipes” are too small to handle so much high speed Internet traffic. I can imagine ASEAN might be interested in collaborating on a true fault-tolerant infrastructure for the region that can survive catastrophic losses of submarine communication.

At least this outage coincides with the natural holiday slowdown for many companies. There is some serenity in being forced away from cyberspace and into meatspace.