serendipityoucity

The Internet is still not back fully in some parts of Asia since 2 major cables broke during an Earth Quake off the coast of Taiwan. It only took a coupla seconds to disrupt communication for millions!

Analysts said the service disruption — caused by the rupture of two undersea data transmission cables in Tuesday’s earthquake in Taiwan — highlights how crucial the cable and Internet infrastructure has become to the modern world. (Globe)

Who are these analysts anyway? I think they are consultants!

A decade ago, telephones and faxes were essential to businesses and governments. Now, telephone lines often take second place, piggybacking on networks set up for Internet or mobile communication. (Globe)

“Governments now recognize these industries as fundamental infrastructure, equal to electricity, water, sewage, roads,” said Markus Buchhorn, an information technology expert at Australian National University. “So if you do have a major breakdown, people will move heaven and earth to fix it.” (Globe)

Disrupted dependency may spark new research into alternatives. Something less vulnerabe perhaps.

“I haven’t experienced anything like this before,” said Francis Lun, general manager at Fulbright Securities, one of many Hong Kong financial firms that were forced to conduct business by telephone on Wednesday. We’ve become too dependent on these optic fibres — a few of them get damaged, and everything collapses. Many lost the opportunity to make fast money.” (Globe)

I luv how geography is so important to the Internet;

part of the problem with this week’s break is that a number of providers may have looked westward to Europe to repair their connections. (Globe)

Asia relies largely on high-speed cables running under the Pacific Ocean all the way to North America, still the technology and communications giant. (Globe)

There are about 15 of these cables; in evidence of the need for more, an Asian consortium was formed earlier this month to lay a new fibre-optic cable from China to the United States in order to boost the capacity of telecom services. (Globe)

The only major cable in the area that appears to have escaped trouble was the E.A.C., or East Asia Crossing, cable belonging to Asia Netcom, a subsidiary of China Netcom. The 12,100-mile cable connects China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan.(NyTimes)

These thing aren’t cheap either! 

Among the damaged cables were the 11,800-mile APCN-2, a $1.1 billion cable built in 2001 that links China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan; and the north Asian loop, a 24,200-mile cable stretching from South Korea around the Eurasian landmass to the Netherlands. (Globe)

C2C, a $2 billion 10,500-mile cable built in 2002 that links China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan to the United States, was also damaged, as were two cables belonging to Flag Telecom, an around-the-world cable project that went public at the height of the dot-com boom and went broke in 2002. Flag, now reorganized under new ownership, said that it had already booked a repair vessel, and that fixing its cables could take up to three weeks. 

Although access appears to have been restored across most of the region, Mr. Enderle predicted that the total bill for Asian telecommunications companies could rise into the hundreds of millions of dollars.(NyTimes)

As for temporary alternatives

It is possible for telecommunications providers to provide backup transmission capacity through satellite, but such services are expensive and likely to be used only for “mission critical” purposes, said Duncan Clark, of Beijing-based consultancy BDA China. (Globe)

That would include governments, encrypted data, bank services, medical records and top corporations, he said.(Globe)

“The large corporations will get priority. Joe Consumer wanting to look at websites is way down the list,” Clark said.(Globe)

This is a case for an alternative model me thinks.  Feels like feudalism coming back to the fore to control some critical resources while democratic access suffers. Then again there is an argument for those who pay big get what they paid for!  Then again…