On 26th of December 2006 a 7.2 strong earthquake in Southern Taiwan damaged several telecommunication submarine cables linking China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, among others, to overseas telecommunication networks, including Internet backbone. 

More than a month later, repair work is not done yet due to bad weather conditions & poor equipment. Customers, Telecom companies & media start to express their discontent."It will be a long time before Internet access is fully recovered between Asian and the US as workers are using "technologies of the 19th century to solve problems of the 21st century," Sina.com said today

According Shanghai Daily, quoting Global Marine General Manager, none of the optical fiber in 4000m deep damaged cables have been fully repaired yet. Today's report says that work should be completed by January 30th (some other sources say end of February). Currently up to 70% of traffic from mainland China has been re-routed using alternative pathways such as satellite links, which are slow, expensive and unstable compared with cable-based connections.

This remind us the loss of satellite Intelsat IS-804 in January 2005 which left 10 countries of the Pacific rim without any communication links for days, as no backup was available) and forced 8 others to switch to their backup systems. 

Such events clearly show us what happens when main overseas communications links go down and how weak, when exists, are fallback systems.

Just imagine if such disruptions were man-made in order to turn the world back to the "telegraph age"….

More about : Reuters, Shanghai Daily, Heise Online.

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