Cable Repair Delayed

Repair of damaged cables in Asia to take longer than expected

Jonathan Adams

International Herald Tribune, January 16, 2007

Internet services across East Asia are still not functioning at full capacity three weeks after an earthquake near Taiwan damaged critical communication cables, and the authorities in Taiwan and Hong Kong said final repairs on the lines would be delayed by at least a month.

Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan, part of a consortium that owns four of the eight undersea cables that were cut during the earthquake on Dec. 26, said Tuesday that bad weather and rough seas had hampered repair efforts.

The damage was also more extensive than initially thought, the company said, with its cables severed in at least 10 places.

The company now estimates that the first cable will not be repaired until early next week, with the three others fixed by the end of the month. The Hong Kong Telecommunications Authority said in a statement Monday that repairs on all the damaged cables would not be completed until the middle of February, weather conditions permitting. The original estimate for final repairs was mid-January.

The earthquake, just off the southern coast of Taiwan, snapped cables carrying 90 percent of voice and data traffic in East and Southeast Asia. Contractors for the cable consortium, which also includes SingTel, the dominant provider in Singapore, are still struggling to fix the cables, some of which lie 3.3 kilometers, or 2 miles, beneath the ocean surface.

SingTel, Chunghwa and PCCW in Hong Kong said that they were able to quickly reroute nearly all traffic away from the damaged cables. But the alternative routes are circuitous, sometimes degrading the quality of voice traffic and slowing Internet speeds.

Chunghwa stressed that despite the repair delays, most services were back to normal. Hong Kong Internet services are operating at about 80 percent of normal efficiency.

Hong Kong users report that Internet performance, especially when accessing or downloading material from Web sites based in North America, remains sluggish during peak periods.

But while most services continue uninterrupted, the digital breakdown has prompted new thinking on how to strengthen the region's contacts with the rest of the world. "In order to deal with future disasters, we're going to set up several contingency plans," Chunghwa Telecom said. The firm says it will add extra satellite capacity for its voice communications, buy or lease additional cables as a backup for Internet traffic, and propose a joint "backup mechanism" for countries in the region.

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