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Cable outage leads to calls for risk management strategy

Internet service here and around the region slowly coming back on-line

SASIWIMON BOONRUANG

Thai Internet service providers have called for the government to help set up a risk management strategy to counter Internet and telecommunications disruptions in the event of natural disasters such as the recent Taiwan earthquake.

The earthquake damaged up to seven undersea cables, knocking out or severely slowing Internet traffic across the region over the past two weeks, and service is only starting to recover now.

A source at CAT Telecom told Database that the repair work was expected to be completed by mid-January.

Internet Thailand president and CEO Trin Tantsetthi noted that over half of the country's Internet bandwidth had been disrupted at one point, but added that CAT had done its best to solve the problem and that the disaster had been a global issue.

However, he said that Thailand had no contingency plans and that it was vulnerable since most of its bandwidth goes through one fibre optic link.

He noted that the same incident had occurred seven years ago when an earthquake hit Taiwan, causing telecommunications to go down for three weeks.

He said Internet and telecommunications should be considered as a part of national security, with long term planning and risk management strategies formulated accordingly.

Trin said the country's international gateway should not be subject to a single point of failure, and suggested that Thailand should co-operate with Vietnam and Laos to boost its links with Southern China.

CS Loxinfo managing director Anant Kaweruamvongs also acknowledged that users had been hampered by slow access speeds, but he did not think that extra international gateways would necessarily solve the problem. He said the issue was that the available cable systems all took the same route.

An alternative cable network runs through the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East, he noted, but pointed out that this was more expensive.

Anant said that the government should take responsibility because Internet infrastructure was a national asset. "The government should take the lead," he said, pointing out that the Internet was to the modern economy as important as roads and other infrastructure.

Pacific Internet (Thailand), with outgoing Internet channels through CAT, ADC and ITLC, was also disrupted, according to vice president Supachot Kanjanakontong, who noted that 80 percent of the region's physical links go through Taiwan.

He said that Pacific Internet had tried to re-route traffic through its nodes in other parts of the region, such as the link between Australia and the US. But he also noted that corporate users had to have policies in place to optimise Internet resources during such incidents.

National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) director Dr Pansak Siriruchatapong suggested that every ISP should design their networks to have at least two international links.

He noted that the National Telecommunications Commission had a policy to open more international gateways, and suggested that this might help in the future.

Two of the region's largest undersea cables are SEA-ME-WE3 and the Asia Pacific Cable Network (APCN), both of which were affected.

SEA-ME-WE3 is one of the world's longest and largest capacity submarine cable networks, spanning 38,000 kms and with 39 landing points straddling the Pacific Rim, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe. The cable has been upgraded to a capacity of 70Gbps.

APCN has a capacity of 10Gbps connecting Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

CAT Telecom has an investment in both cables.

Another damaged undersea cable system was C2C, which connects China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan to the US. It is not expected to be completely fixed until February.

Dr Pansak pointed out that Thailand was also indirectly connected to the C2C system, affecting traffic here.

Internet Traffic Report, which monitors data flow around the world and then displays an index representing the reliability and speed of connections gave only a 53 for Asia compared with a global index of 80 on Monday afternoon, up slightly from 46 on Sunday evening as shown in the illustration at left.

Meanwhile, in an AFP report out of Beijing, Chinese state media announced last Friday that nearly 10,000 Chinese web site operators had lost the use of their .com Internet addresses due to telecom problems caused by last month's earthquake.

The quake caused thousands of .com domain names held by Chinese users to vanish from world registries, the Beijing Times reported, citing domain registry sources.

Lingering disruptions to overseas Web connections also have prevented them from accessing the overseas registries to re-register the names.

"So far, a large number of domain names held by businesses have been snatched by overseas investors, causing businesses to suffer losses," the newspaper said. It provided no examples.

Domain names ending in .com or other suffixes provide easily recognisable names for website addresses, which are actually a series of underlying numbers.

Though underlying websites are unaffected, the paper said more than 9,000 domain-holders had lost the use of their .com addresses, and the number was expected to grow while the Internet disruptions last.

The undersea quake damaged cables that carry most of the region's telecom traffic, sparking widespread communications disruptions affecting Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere.

Telecommunications firms have sent repair ships to the waters off southern Taiwan, where the 7.1 quake hit on December 26, to repair the damage.

Access in China to overseas websites was cut off for several days following the quake. Though largely restored, the connections remain slower than normal.

Bangkok Post, 10 Jan 2007