Taiwan Quake Darkens Asia-Pacific Telecom, Internet

Among the hardest hit were major lines APCN2 and Sea-Me- We 3. APCN 2 was knocked out between Shantou, China and Tanshui, Taiwan, and between Lantau, Hong Kong and Chongming, China, regional telcos said. It wasn’t clear by our deadline where Sea-Me-We 3, which links Asia and Europe, had been damaged.

Firms that depend on the undersea cables immediately began steering traffic elsewhere, but alternate paths quickly became congested, they said. Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest operator, said its infrastructure was hit particularly hard. Calling to Japan and China dropped to 11% and 10% of capacity, respectively, Chunghwa Telecom officials said in a statement. Just 40% of the telco’s international calling capacity to the U.S. was functioning normally, the firm said Wed.

Verizon Business counted damage to 8 undersea cables it either owns or leases, a spokeswoman said. Verizon has technicians on the ground in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and elsewhere fixing terrestrial problems, the spokeswoman told us. But at this point most of the problems are under water, she said. Verizon Business has ownership interests in more than 18 cable systems in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan-U.S., China-U.S., Southern Cross (China, New Zealand, Australia) and the one-year-old Sea-Me-We-4 cable linking Europe and Asia.

It could be several weeks before the cables are patched because the repair process is cumbersome, telco officials said. Cable owners must determine where, exactly, the damage occurred across the thousands of kilometers of cable and repair ships have to be deployed there, officials said. “It takes a while,” a Verizon official said. Eight STM-1 cables from Okinawa, Japan and 4 to Shanghai are also serving as backup, reports said. Singapore Telecom, France Telecom, Pakistan Telecom and others own the hard-hit Sea-Me-We-3. China Unicom, StarHub, Telekom Malaysia and Telstra all have a stake in the damaged APCN2, which connects Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore.

Meanwhile, serious shifting of traffic is underway. Verizon Business is using Sea-Me-We-4 for some rerouting, it said. That cable runs from Southern France to Singapore via the Mediterranean and is functioning properly, the Verizon Business spokeswoman said: “We're using parts of that to work around Taiwan.” AT&T didn’t comment on its contingency operations by our deadline.

Malaysian Internet service provider TM Net reported service degradation caused by several outages at its international transit and peering links, mainly in China and Taiwan. “Internet users in Malaysia and other parts of Asia may be experiencing some delay when accessing content and websites hosted outside of Malaysia, especially in the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and Europe,” TM Net said in a statement Wed. TM Net said it was acting immediately to divert traffic through back-up paths to reduce congestion.

BT said it doesn’t own any of the cables hit. BT customers calling into the earthquake area, however, were having problems, a BT spokesman said -- particularly those trying to reach Taiwan. BT Wed. was trying to work with other telcos to reroute calls where it could, whether over land or via other undersea cables, the spokesman said. BT doesn’t have Internet services in that part of the world, he said.

Satellite providers’ response was less clear, though FSS providers are known for stepping in when natural disasters cause terrestrial networks to fail. Calls to SES Americom, SES New Skies, Loral Skynet and AsiaSat weren’t returned by our deadline Wed. “I'm sure we do have customers that have satellite services as part of their diversity plans,” a Verizon Business spokeswoman said, but she couldn’t name specific customers.

Intelsat said its satellites over the Pacific, particularly IS 701, were carrying more traffic Wed. as the FSS operator tapped its satellite fleet and international teleports to reconnect customers. Work went on “through the night to provide additional satellite capacity to many of our customers throughout Southeast Asia that were affected by the earthquake,” said Intelsat Senior Mgr.-Managed Network Services Nick Dowsett: “Voice and Internet connectivity has been restored for some customers in Asia and we are in the process of restoring more.” Intelsat was also in the process of reconnecting a major U.S. telco to the region, he said. “In one instance, we were able to bring up service from scratch in four hours for one of our regional telco customers,” he said.

New Trans-Pacific Cable Slated for 2008 Olympics

Wed.’s undersea cable damage comes on the heels of a $500 million international pact to build a new, beefier undersea cable system directly linking the U.S. mainland and China in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Verizon Business Dec. 18 signed on to the project as the only U.S.- based member in a consortium that includes China Telecom, China Netcom, China Unicom, Korea Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom. The new cable system -- to be named the Trans- Pacific Express -- will boast more than 60 times the capacity of the cable that directly links the U.S. and China today, Verizon officials said. The new fiber will carry 1.28 Tbps at first, designed for up to 5.12 Tbps when fully loaded.

Verizon intends to design the Pacific network using a “mesh” architecture similar to its trans-Atlantic cable system, a spokeswoman said Wed. A mesh network in the Pacific “would have reduced or eliminated the impacts we're seeing today,” she said. Verizon’s trans-Atlantic mesh design provides 6 different pathways for rerouting traffic, if needed, on 3 major cable networks, Verizon said. Trans- Atlantic undersea cable networks used to consist of ring configurations for redundancy, but that architecture only protects against a single failure within any ring. If 2 or more segments are disrupted, the ring breaks down, Verizon said.

Construction of the 18,000-km. system will begin in the first quarter of 2007, the consortium said. The project is expected to be completed in time for the 2008 Summer games. Other Olympic preparations are already underway, including launch in early Dec. of a new Chinese weather satellite to better track the climate during competition. The Chinese craft, Fengyun 2D, is in orbit and functioning properly, the Chinese govt. said last week.