serendipityoucity

Mtl3p suggested i read the following article some time ago:

Mother Earth Mother Board
The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.
By Neal Stephenson

I was dumbfounded! So much fiber wrapped around the planet.  Deep sea glass filled lines connect islands and continents, row upon row of deep trenches dug in the deepest lurkium jungles, deserts, cities and everything in between, along roads, rail and strung along sewer pipes. I had Philippina and Chinese girlfriends busing to suburban Ottawa plants to work on the shop floor to feed these cables. Somehow this got done and i was completely oblivious to its implications, policies and physical realities.  All these deals got struck, land negotiated and rights of passage given. The world, in the last couple of decades got wrapped up like a ball of wool with glass strands and few of us had any input. Unbelievable how citizens have so little say in the infrastructures that get built and yet pay for them!

And now, an Earthquake disrupts Asia’s communications. 2 deep sea cables used by several countries to route calls and Internet traffic got cut by an earthquake that hit Taiwan on Dec. 26th and millions of people are left without a communication system. Only 2 cables!

Crews fixing the cables would have to pull them up and transfer them to a ship for repair, the company said.

The damage to the two lines, located in the south, cut off 50 percent to 60 percent of Chunghwa’s overall telephone capacity, the company said. Most severely affected were connections to China, Japan and Southeast Asian countries, it said.

The company also lost 60 percent of its telephone service to the U.S.Chunghwa said 98 percent of Taiwan’s communications capacity with Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong was disrupted.

Hong Kong telephone company PCCW Ltd., which also provides Internet service, said the quake cut its data capacity in half. Many Internet users were unable to access Web sites in parts of America, Taiwan and South Korea. Calls to Taiwan were not going through.
In China, Internet access was cut or had become extremely slow, said an official from China Netcom, the country’s No. 2 phone company.

CCTV, the state-run television network, said China Telecom Corp., China’s biggest phone company, was contacting counterparts in the U.S. and Europe about using satellites to make up for the shortfall.
KDDI Corp., Japan’s major carrier for international calls, said Thursday that its fixed-line telephone service was affected.

KDDI spokesman Haruhiko Maeda said customers were having trouble making calls to India and the Middle East, which are usually routed through cables near Taiwan. Maeda said the company was rerouting calls to go through the U.S. and Europe; the company did not know how long it will take to repair the cables.

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said that international roaming service provided by Japan’s major three telecommunications companies — NTT DoCoMO, KDDI, and Softbank, has been affected. Ministry official Akira Yamanaka said that some customers were unable to make calls using their cell phones in countries including Taiwan.

South Korea’s largest telecom company, KT, said that lines it uses were damaged, affecting dozens of companies and institutions, including South Korea’s Foreign Ministry.

People’s Daily- Broken Undersea Cable Snaps Internet Access in China

Intriguing how countries that normally do not cooperate with each other agree to route their communication traffic in a few shared cables. A Channel News Asia aticle explains

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 extent of damage to the cable is extensive. We are clearly taking this on two fronts - we want to restore service on the damaged cable as soon as possible and at the same time, we are working round the clock with our consortium partners to do the traffic diversions. We think there’s a good chance we can restore service as soon as possible," says Choo Pee Yin, director of Network Operations at SingTel.

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

Companies lease cables and when they go down it affects international toll-free calling, VOIP, Internet access, banking, trading.  The 2 damaged cables are the

SeaMeWe 3 (South East Asia Middle East Western Europe 3) and APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2) underseas cables. Both are major telecommunications arteries in East Asia and their temporary loss is what’s led to the problems being observed on Wednesday.

These were major telecom routes and traffic has been re-routed to other lines that are of course getting congested.  This can also affect your tek support calls to India!

In India, back offices and call centers experienced some difficulty, but industry officials said the full extent of the problem would not be known until later in the day when data and voice traffic peaked during European and U.S. business hours.

Pretty fragile infrastructures indeed! Some analysts state that

most international telecommunications are now carried by submarine cable, forming a multi-billion dollar network that spans the globe.

Booming demand for increasingly sophisticated services is met by continually adding capacity but as countless users found out on Wednesday, they have become ever more dependent on a system which can be vulnerable at certain key points.

Independent telecommications analyst Paul Budde said in a report earlier this year that the first undersea cables were laid about 150 years ago to transmit telegrams and they have evolved to reflect changing technology.

The Australia-based analyst said it cost up to US$500 000 a kilometre to lay modern cables and recently, there had been an increase in development of submarine infrastructure as demand for broadband internet and cheap telephone services increased.

"Changes in undersea systems have taken place on a giant scale - not since the initial building of these networks 150 years ago have we seen such activity, mainly driven by the increase in data traffic.

"Systems that were built as late as 1998 proved to be inadequate for the demand in capacity required a mere 18 months later.

"Within a period of a few short years, there were … at least 1 000 long-distance carriers and 10 000 ISP (Internet service providers) requiring global connectivity," he said.

Such dependency on 2 cables, an infrastructure that runs through the Ring of Fire!  Dam! Do people know how fragile the systems they depend are! Calamaty often surfaces submerged knowledge!