nomad4ever

Actually I wanted to post this one here 3 days ago. But nothing worked – obviously.

An earthquake disrupted internet services in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia and Japan. I currently still have heavy problems accessing my e-mail not to talk about websurfing. Seems to be one of the biggest disaster since 1999, when a major internet outage occured in Asia.

This time several Undersea Cables were cut (more than 8!), including the Asia Pacific Cable Network, which links North and Southeast Asia, and the SEA-ME-WE-2 link, which stretches from South Korea around the Eurasian land mass to the Netherlands. The earthquake struck Taiwan at 10.26pm on tuesday – exactly the second anniversary of the deadly Asian tsunami, there were even warnings by seismologists that giant waves will hit the Philippines. This fortunately didn’t happen.

Luckily, this website shouldn’t be effected at all, as it’s hosted somewhere in California, somewhere in Los Angeles, if I’m not wrong. Just I wasn’t able to access it from here.

They are talking several weeks (!) to fix the whole situation completely, as boats have to be send there and fix the broken cables. Those undersea cables lie some 8km below the ocean’s surface; each kilometre of cable costs up to an estimated US$500,000 to lay. APCN 2 alone stretches 19,000 km.

The owners of those undersea cables and most effected carriers are Singtel and Starhub of Singapore, PCCW of Hong Kong, China Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest phone company. In Bali, practically the whole international part of the internet is still down at least 90%.

National pages (hosted in Indonesia) can be accessed with normal speed. International pages you can access sometimes with crawling slow speed some American or European Servers, but it’s just not worth it. Waiting times are in the double-digit minutes and sending e-mail is virtually impossible, although receiving works better.

Let’s see, if I can post this interim post somehow…

Okay, so my previous provider PT Telkom didn’t work at all for international web, am trying IndosatM2 now. Just subscribed online with their Dialup Service (luckily a national site; lots of indonesian companies host abroad as well), put in the Credit Card details, and – Voila! It works, I’m online again…….. Yipppppeeeee! :-)

I wonder, what connection they are using. It’s even cheaper than PT Telkom, around Rp 2.500/hour instead of Rp 9.000 weekdays and Rp 6.000 during the weekend. Should have done that much much earlier. Sometimes an earthquake can be quite useful to wake you up, check your internet connection and stop wasting precious money.

Technorati : disruption, earthquake, indosat, indosatm2, internet, internet breakdown, outage, pacific cable network, pt telkom, seacable, seamewe, taiwan earthquake, telkom, tsunami

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written by Chris