Asian telecom reveals 'death grave' after an earthquake

Just a few seconds of an earthquake in the ocean was enough for all of Asia's wide telecom networks to be crippled and collapsed, Internet services lurked like turtles, phones turned off and financial transactions almost closed. ice.

Analysts say that the Internet disaster that Asia is suffering has identified a grave inside the world's telecommunications network: Too dependent on some of the main cable axes that run along the meridian lines in the regions. prone to earthquakes, tsunamis without the expected solutions, replacement.

" They were mostly built from the dot-com period in 2001, but since then, almost no investment has been made ," said analyst Tim Dillon. " We are so used to connecting at all times, so when the Internet suddenly goes out, many people are shocked. Especially in Asia, where the volume of mobile data connections and usage is. The Internet is a giant type . "

Source: AFP Now, the earthquake has caused many people to open their eyes to the need to build a backup system.

Incidents of undersea cables are not the first to occur. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, anchored ships, and biting sharks . can cause the cable to break. For this reason, people often bundle many fiber optic cables into rolls.

For example, FLAG Telecom's North Asia Loop runs undersea from Hong Kong to Taiwan, to Korea and Japan, and then runs back to Hong Kong. If a cable in the whole coil is broken, the data will be automatically transferred to the remaining fibers and the user will almost never notice any changes.

Trouble trying to remove

Paralysis occurs when there are too many strands breaking at the same time at many different stations. The seafloor off Taiwan, where the earthquake occurred, could place more than a dozen different cables and thus, the consequences were so widespread. Recalling in 2003, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake in Algeria broke the cable network in the Mediterranean, disconnected from France and made Internet access in the whole Middle East as sluggish.

In the case of Asia, some telecommunications service providers in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, though having (reroute) traffic to the United States through Europe to avoid bottlenecks in Taiwan, have problems. There are very few "Western forward" cable axles. "They are overloaded," said Dillon.

Before the Internet, satellites were a reliable backup channel for international calls. But satellites can't carry huge amounts of Internet data like fiber optic networks. Using satellites for this purpose is too expensive and not feasible.

All objective and subjective causes have forced Asia to rely on high-speed cable axes running across Asia-Pacific to North America. There are about 15 cable axles of this type, and the third night earthquake showed: A big shock can destroy many cables at the same time if they are installed too close together.

In early December, a group of Asian and North American telecommunications networks announced plans to build a new $ 500 million cable to upgrade the speed of communications between the US and China. The project is expected to start construction in the next 3 months and will be completed in the third quarter of 2008.

Trong Cam