Cable Cuts Near Taiwan Disrupting Asian Traffic
Haris Shamsi
multiple cable cuts on key systems in the region in the early parts
of this week. This echoed events that took place on Boxing Day back
in 2006, when six out of seven systems was cut as a result of an
earthquake off the southern coast of Taiwan.
While a complete picture of the situation is still emerging, CommsDay
understands that APCN2, APCN, EAC and SMW3 were impacted near Taiwan,
adversely impacting traffic flow in and out of the region.
A ComputerWorld Singapore report put the time of the fault on APCN2
at 10:50am Wednesday. The affected segment was between China and
Taiwan, forcing regional Internet traffic to be routed onto other
systems. The report suggests that the APCN2 cut impacted the
performance of the Internet for users in South East Asia.
The report also highlighted two previous faults on APCN2 - on Segment
7 connecting Hong Kong and Taiwan and on Segment 1 connecting
Singapore and Malaysia. The sources told ComputerWorld that the cause
of the fault was still unknown. However, a Straits Times report is
suggesting that Typhoon Morakot, which triggered massive flooding in
Taiwan, is the cause of the latest APCN2 cut.
A spokesman for Pacnet also confirmed to ComputerWorld that there
were "double faults" on its pan-Asian EAC system off the coast of
Taiwan over the weekend. According to the report, the EAC cable
experienced its first cut in the early mornings of 9 August on a
segment linking Taiwan and Hong Kong and a second cut on another
segment linking the two countries roughly 12 hours later. Pacnet also
gave no explanation for the EAC cuts. Pacnet was not immediately
available for comment.
In addition to the Singapore report, Smart Communications in the
Philippines also acknowledged some impact to its international voice
and SMS services.
As of 7:30pm on Wednesday, Asian nodes monitored by the Internet
Traffic Report website, which tracks the performance of Internet
traffic, registered lower than average performance scores and
extended response times. With the exception of Japan and Taiwan, all
other nodes in Asia monitored by the site registered performance
index scores of lower than 80, resulting in an average performance
index score for the region of 70 out of 100 - compared to 86 out of
100 globally. Singapore (54 out of 100) and Qatar (33 out of 100)
registered the lowest scores.
Response time for much of the Asian nodes were well above 200
milliseconds, with Qatar's itr-test.isp.qa registering a response
time of 615 milliseconds, compared to the fastest node in Japan,
which had an average response time of 127 milliseconds.