Telecoms, internet in Pakistan

December 27, 2006

Earthquake Cuts Asian Telephone and Internet Services

By Randy Chen

(AXcess News) Hong Kong - A major earthquake in Indonesia disrupted telephone and Internet services in Southeast Asian countries Wednesday after an underseas cable off the coast of Taiwan was damaged by the 7.1 quake.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan’s largest operator, managed to reroute connections, restoring partial service to the US, Canada and China. But it could still be weeks before repairs can be made to the undersea cable damaged by the earthquake.

Operators are using back-up systems to help alleviate the bottleneck as parts of Hong Kong, China, Singapore and India remain without Internet and telephone services.

Online banking services in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China remain down with HSBC completely offline.

Singapore Telecom, France Telecom SA and Pakistan Telecommunication Co. are in a group that own the Sea-Me-We3 cables linking Europe to Asia that were damaged by the quake.

Part of Asia Netcom Corp.’s EAC fiber optic cable was also damaged.

According to Internet Traffic Report, a Website that monitors the flow of global Internet traffic, the average response time in miliseconds in Asia is now 405 and packet loss has reached 30 per cent.

The earthquake struck at 8:26 p.m. local time on Dec. 26, 10 kilometers (6 miles) under the seabed, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site and Internet as well as telephone services have been down ever since.

The repairs will be outsourced, using ships designed to pick up cable from the sea bed and repair it. Some repairs could take up to a month to complete.