Mon, Sep 27, 1999 page17

• Taiwan's phones still reconnecting

  TELECOMS Scores of households still await the restoration of land-line services, while most mobile phone base stations are up and running

  • By Tu Po-heng / STAFF REPORTER
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  Despite the general resumption of local, long-distance and international phone services to households hurt by Tuesday's earthquake, there were still 190,900 households in Taiwan without service as of Saturday.

  State-run Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) said damaged roads and collapsed buildings have impeded repair work. "In order to expedite the progress, we set up a disaster rescue center yesterday morning and dispatched a team of technicians from non-disaster areas to the areas that have been affected," said Shen Chin-yi, (沈進益), senior director at Chunghwa Telecom's Public Relations Division.

  Chunghwa Telecom, expected to suffer the heaviest financial losses because of the earthquake, already had services to 162,500 households back on-line by Saturday night.

  In the wake of a sudden influx of phone traffic resulting from the quake, Chunghwa Telecom instituted controls on long-distance calls. "As of now, the percentage of successful phone calls to the northern and southern parts of Taiwan has resumed to the levels before the earthquake, while calls to the central part have returned to 50 percent of normal," said Shen.

  Part of the Asian Pacific Optical Network, an international optical fiber, was also damaged, disrupting more than 7,000 circuits to Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and the US.

  "We are trying to repair the cable now. In order to meet current demand, we have spoken with foreign telecom companies to allow us to use some of their back-up circuits," said Shen.

  As for mobile phone services, Chunghwa Telecom has repaired 97 percent of the damage caused to its base stations, with 108 stations waiting for the resumption of electric power supply in order to resume operations.

  Meanwhile, the company has increased the availability of radio frequencies to cope with increasing traffic.

  Other mobile phone service providers also have most of their networks back on-line. Rita Tien (田鳳賢), a public relations officer at the Mobitai Communications Corp (東信電訊), said only 10 percent of its base stations are still off-line, a large improvement from the original 80 percent.

  Mobitai suffered the heaviest system failure on Tuesday as most of its base stations are situated in the central part of Taiwan near the epicenter of the earthquake.

  "Most of the base stations that are off-line are awaiting resumption of electricity; actual damage to equipment accounts for only a small part of the problem," said Tien.

  She also said a precise damage assessment and financial loss report will come out within the next two days and the company expects all base stations to resume operations within a week.

  There was no surge in users in the aftermath of the quake since "the base stations were down because of the loss of power, so the phones couldn't work," said Tien.

  In addition, Pacific Communications Services Co Ltd (台灣大哥大) said nearly 80 percent of its base stations were already back up and running by Friday.
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