Asian undersea earthquake shows Internet is far more robust than you thought
By Gareth Powell
First my apologies for the size of the illustration but you need it to see how robust the Internet really is. How much redundancy is built in. How big are the margins to deal with disaster.
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake just south of Taiwan knocked an unprecedented seven submarine communications cables out of service on December 26, impairing international communications to China plus Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore. Never before have so many cables been damaged simultaneously: of the nine cables that pass through the Luzon Strait, only two cables, Asia Netcom’s EAC and the older Guam-Philippines Cable, escaped damage.
The suggestion has been made that there was a lack of investment in Asian cable infrastructure. TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map 2007 shows this not to be correct. An array of undersea cables connect the countries of Asia to one another and to the world.
In the past year, three of these cable systems, Asia Netcom’s EAC, FLAG and REACH’s North Asia Loop and the APCN-2 consortium cable upgraded their networks’ capacity, in order to accommodate growing traffic volumes.
However, most intra-Asian systems are operating at less than 15 percent of their potential capacities, leaving plenty of room for future traffic growth.
What steps can be taken to protect against future network outages in Asia?
The upcoming deployment of new cables, such as the Trans Pacific Express and Asia American Gateway, will provide new routing options, helping to improve networks’ resiliency. While many buyers already purchase capacity on multiple cable systems to provide redundant capacity, network operators may procure capacity on an even more diverse array of cable systems in earthquake prone regions, and deploy fault-tolerant mesh networking technologies over these cables.
Finally, these outages may increase interest in routing more capacity from Asia and Europe over the trans-Russia networks of Rostelecom and TransTeleCom. Once again, my apologies for the size of the map but it is important if only to give you a feeling of security.
Source:Telegeography
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January 14th, 2007
The map of cables may suggest redundancy, but soon it will be a month since the earthquake and internet access inside Mainland China is still completely spavined.
January 15th, 2007
actually i think the earthquake illustrates how over-reliance upon specific physical links weakens the internet. traffic from mainland china to the rest of the world has been greatly affected since dec. 26., with repairs being pushed back farther and farther due to severe conditions. the costs to u.s.-based businesses such as dell computers has been huge.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=4&no=339915&rel_no=1
January 15th, 2007
An update on that from the FT which pretty much usually gets it right:
Turning back the clock to fix Asia’s deep-sea phone cable
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei
In 1850, a ship called Goliath laid the first submarine telegraph cable
linking Britain and France. The cable, which consisted of a single wire
insulated with rubber, failed a few hours after reaching France - a French
fisherman had hauled it in with his catch and to free it had to cut the
cable.
Nowadays submarine cables, mostly using fibre-optic technology, link all the world’s continents except Antarctica in a sophisticated global
telecommunications system used by billions.
But on December 27, international phone lines and internet connections
across most of Asia almost collapsed when an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale hit off Taiwan’s southern coast.
Telecoms companies say services are back to normal, but users in the region and in Europe trying to call Asia are still experiencing bad lines and
difficulty in making connections.
Global Marine, a private UK company specialising in laying and repairing
undersea cables and which traces its origins back to the 1850 operation, has three ships in the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and the Philippines where it is working on three of the 21 cable faults that the quake caused.
Ian Douglas, Global Marine Asia director, says the bulk of the affected
infrastructure lies at such great depths and in such a challenging
environment that the company has had to resort to old-fashioned techniques.
“Normally we would use unmanned submarines to bring the cables up to our ship and repair them there, but these remotely controlled vehicles can only go down to 2,000 to 2,500 metres,” he said. “The cables we’re dealing with here lie up to 4,000 metres deep.”
So the repair ships are using a traditional technique instead: they sail
back and forth across what they estimate is the cable’s path and try to pick it up with a grapnel hook.
“It’s a jungle down there,” says Mr Douglas.
The cable systems connecting Asian countries with each other and the outside world are large loops that all pass through the Bashi Channel, the
best-placed strait connecting north-east and south-east Asia.
The high concentration of undersea cables means once one cable is picked up, it might drag others with it. The crews seek to cut the cable and attach its two ends to buoys before making the repairs and linking the two ends again.
But the Bashi Channel has some of the strongest currents in the world, and the crews work in winds of up to 30-40 knots.
“We need to use special buoys that will not just be swept away and vanish,” says Mr Douglas.
Moreover, many cables that run east-west were buried under the seabed in the quake.
Although the telecoms companies know the original path of their cables and can determine with lasers where they are broken, the crews on the ships cannot see what the seabed looks like, so progress is hard to predict.
Global Marine’s work has been delayed because it needed to fly in new
equipment for a cable between south China and Taiwan.
If everything goes smoothly, this repair will be finished next week and the
other two faults the company is working on are scheduled to be repaired by the end of the month.