Hong Kong - Internet connections were restored to normal in
Hong Kong Wednesday, 50 days after an undersea earthquake off Taiwan
severely damaged cables to the former British colony.
Six out of seven submarine cables coming in and out of Hong Kong
were snapped by the December 26 earthquake, causing severe disruption
to e-mail and internet connections.
Services were gradually improved but it took until Wednesday for
Hong Kong's Telecommunications Authority to announce that the repairs
to the cables were complete.
Singapore, Thailand and other regional cities and countries were
also badly affected by the quake but Hong Kong's reliance on the
undersea cables made the impact on the city of 6.8 million worse.
The disruption caused to business and private users sparked calls
for Hong Kong service providers to have a better back-up system in
the event of another catastrophic breakdown.
A Telecommunications Authority spokesman said Wednesday: 'We are
pleased to announce the repair of these cable systems is completed
and all our external telecommunications services, including internet
access, have been fully restored.
'Our internet service providers have recovered their external
connection capacity back to the normal operational levels before the
earthquake.'
The repairs were at one stage expected to take until the end of
February to complete but appear to have been finished ahead of
schedule.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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