Internet cable to be fixed by month's end

The damaged China-US undersea cable which Friday left over 5 million Internet users in Taiwan unable to access sites in North America and beyond should be up and running by Feb. 23, Chunghwa Telecom (中華電信) officials said yesterday.

Full Internet access was restored on Friday evening at around 9pm through a backup submarine cable stretching from Taiwan to Japan. Although officials still do not know exactly what caused the failure of the undersea cable, China's state-run phone company, China Telecom (中國電信), asked Japanese authorities to dispatch a repair vessel to the site to begin work on the line.

The submarine cable, which carries Internet traffic from most of East Asia to the US, was broken at a spot about 300 nautical miles off the coast of Shanghai near the island of Chongmingdao (崇明島). The closest port to the point of severance is Yokohama, Japan, where the repair ship has been commissioned.

The ship should reach the cable before Feb. 14 and, weather permitting, the cable should be functioning again by Feb. 23, according to Chunghwa. The company plans to compensate customers for any losses incurred by the incident.

"Although damage to the undersea cable was not of Chunghwa Telecom's making, losses suffered by our customers will be dealt with by deducting [an unspecified amount] from monthly cable rental fees in a manner stipulated by our existing contracts," the firm said.

So far, officials from the Internet service providers hit hardest by the 13-hour service interruption -- HiNet and Seednet -- have not announced any plans to compensate their customers for the service stoppage.