Dec 28, 2006, 11:36 GMT
Taipei - Internet and phone traffic in Asia might take weeks to return to normal as ships were dispatched Thursday to repair the earthquake-damaged undersea cables that have disrupted telecommunications services across the continent.
'Four cable ships left Japan, Singapore and the Philippines today,' Lin Jen-hung, vice president of Taiwan's state-run Chunghwa Telecom said Thursday at a news conference. 'They are expected to arrive next Tuesday and start repairing the undersea cables. The repair will take about two weeks.'
China Netcom on the mainland said two ships had already begun repair work, which usually involves hauling damaged cables to the surface, and added that the length of the repairs would depend on the weather and the extent of the damage.
In the meantime, service was partially being restored as telecommunications companies rerouted traffic to alternate communications lanes. Slight improvements were seen in internet traffic Thursday, two days after the quakes, but the Internet Traffic Report website, which monitors Internet connectivity, said the speed and reliability of the internet in Asia was about half the world average.
Firms also began to tally what the service outages and disruptions that affected tens of millions of people would cost them.
'From the time our service was interrupted until it is resumed, we will exempt our clients of fees,' Lin said, adding that the service disruptions would cause at least 150 million Taiwan dollars (4.5 million US dollars) in losses to his company.
An executive at one Hong Kong daily newspaper described the event as a 'technological tsunami' that will cost the city millions of US dollars in lost business.
Commentators spoke of the 'collapse of the virtual world' and Asia being knocked 'back to the phone age, and beyond.'
But business losses would have been far greater, analysts said, if the outages had not taken place during year-end holidays when business is relatively light.
The problems was caused by a magnitude-6.7 undersea earthquake that struck Taiwan's southern coast Tuesday, leaving two people dead and injuring about 50 others.
Chunghwa Telecom said the quake and its aftershocks damaged four of the six undersea cables it owns, cutting off or slowing down the region's voice, data and internet connections with India, Europe and the United States.
The telecommunications service in neighbouring countries was affected because a huge amount of it is routed by the damaged submarine optical cables, which, given their expense to install, are generally owned by consortia of communications companies.
On Thursday, telecommunications-service providers were waiting anxiously for the repair of the cables.
Telecommunications officials in Singapore, where thousands of home users and companies were cut off from the internet Wednesday, advised internet users to expect slow traffic for at least a few days.
Singapore's two internet-service providers, Singapore Telecommunications and StarHub, scrambled to restore service and reroute traffic.
'This will allow for continued, albeit slower, Internet connectivity over the next few days,' the Infocomm Development Authority said in a statement.
While businesses saw their online transactions and communications hit, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, its central bank, said the city-state's interbank payment system and markets were not affected.
A spokesman for the Singapore Exchange noted trading operations are based on an international trading link, rather than internet cables.
In China, 97 per cent of surfers said they had problems accessing overseas websites and 57 per cent said their lives and work were affected, according to a survey Wednesday by the internet portal Sina.
In Hong Kong, telecommunications officials were criticized for failing to explain the cause of the internet chaos until nearly 24 hours after the Taiwan earthquakes.
OFTA, Hong Kong's telecommunications authority, issued a statement late Wednesday on the problems that have frozen computers and international phone lines in the city and left millions of office workers struggling to do their jobs.
A peak-time internet blackout, disrupting e-mail and other services, appeared likely to continue for at least five more days.
Politicians and business leaders began calling for alternatives to be found.
Hong Kong's acting financial secretary, Stephen Ip, said the territory's officials needed to consider better back-up systems through such means as satellite transmission to avoid future problems while Xu Yongming, an official in charge of China Netcom's international network, called for alternative cables as well as satellite communications.
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