Just after Xmas there was a big undersea earthquake in East / SE Asia…

Thankfully it didn’t cause massive damage or deaths on land (compared to the 2004 earthquake) – although there were 42 injuries, 2 deaths and damage to some areas..

it has destroyed 6 fibreoptic cables and damaged 1 other, took out a large chunk of Asia’s telecoms and internet capacity…

It affected comms to Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, the Phillipines, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan…

But just a few days later most of the capacity has been recovered via satellite backup links; some connections are slow and it does seem that “non-essential” traffic such as blogs, myspace is currently being filtered and/or discouraged but people can still use the net

Hong Kong and Taiwanese telephone companies have already deployed two ships to fix the cables, which they said should be done within 2-3 weeks – and many in these two countries also celebrate the Western holiday period so would have less staff to deal with such an incident!

By using backup circuits they are promising an improvement every day – even before the cables are fixed…

yet here in Britain it can take two weeks just to get a single copper pair installed in a building :hopeless: ….