Wed, Mar 14, 2001 page18

• Undersea cable likely cut by fishermen

  TENUOUS THREAD Cable redundancy and avoiding their placement in heavily fished areas is the key to preventing future Internet blackouts, experts say

  • By Dan Nystedt / STAFF REPORTER
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  The China-US submarine cable failure blamed for causing the second major Internet traffic jam across the Pacific in less than a month was actually severed, presumably by fishing trawlers, Chunghwa Telecom (中華電信) officials said yesterday.

  "The area where the cable broke, near Chongmingdao (崇明島) island, off the coast of China, is a heavily fished area," said Wang Hsiao-ping (王筱屏), an engineer at Chunghwa Telecom's Internet network management division.

  Although Chunghwa officials could not speculate on how long it would take to fully repair the China-US undersea cable, one industry insider said it might take up to 20 days. Chinese officials have already dispatched the same undersea cable firm from Japan that made repairs last month.

  On Feb. 9, an electrical malfunction caused over 26 million Internet users throughout Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and other nations in Asia to lose access to Web sites based in the US. Officials who had dusted off their Internet cable back-up plans at the time were ready to move into action when the Net outage hit last Friday.

  Chunghwa Telecom rerouted Net service through an undersea cable connecting Taiwan to Japan and restored full service within 6 hours of the China-US undersea cable severance. The February outage took days to get full service running again.

  "What this highlights is ... simply the lack of [submarine cables] that exist in certain markets, like Taiwan, and how dependant that supply is on single systems," said Steve Liddell, CEO of Level 3 Asia Communications, an undersea cable operator.

  Ideally, what a country needs is a number of different submarine cables in and out of that location to offset the chances a cable severance will lead to an Internet or communications blackout, explained Liddell. He said the new model for laying submarine cable is to use a ring architecture, whereby the system loops around to connect at two points, like a circle, so that if one side is cut, traffic automatically reroutes in the opposite direction.

  "Cables break, there's no doubt about it," said Liddell, but certain precautions can prevent fishermen and undersea cables from tangling with one another.

  Undersea cables should be landed away from the heavily fished areas, "particularly away from the shallow, coastal waters where the China-US cable has broken a number of times," he said. Secondly companies should bury the cable under the ocean floor in shallow water areas, as "the landing site is critical."

  He said some of the new undersea cables being laid around Taiwan are in heavily fished areas, giving rise to concerns the nation's growing Internet and broadband traffic could experience major disruptions in the future.

  Currently, only two cables carry the bulk of Internet and telecommunications traffic across the Pacific to the US West coast, but a number of firms are busy rectifying the situation. SingTel, Level 3 Asia and others are building a new network to ensure smooth, uninterrupted service to Asia.

  The fantastic growth in Internet traffic made these new cable systems necessary as long as five years ago, but deregulation of local telecommunications industries really spurred interest in the region by worldwide undersea cable firms.

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