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Cut cable cripples Web in China


The cable was cut off the coast of Shanghai

In this story:

Cause of break uncertain

A careless fisherman?

RELATED STORIES, SITES

(BEIJING, China) -- Millions of people in China are unable to access much of the Internet after an undersea cable was severed.

Internet users in major mainland cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, said they were unable to access overseas Web sites, but could visit some Chinese addresses.

In Hong Kong, which recently topped an Asia-wide poll of time spent online, Internet users said access had virtually ground to a halt with download times for many sites often running into minutes or failing to connect altogether.

Restoring the cable could take between 10 to 23 days, said officials at the Network Management division of state phone giant China Telecom.

"We are sparing no effort to redirect traffic through other channels, but access speeds could be fairly slow," company spokesperson Wang Yang said.

China has several undersea cables connecting its data networks to the rest of the world, but the Shanghai-U.S. line carried the most traffic, she added.

The phone operator, which plans a multi-billion dollar stock listing in Hong Kong and New York this year, was scrambling to divert Web traffic through satellites and other channels to alleviate the crash, a second official at China Telecom said.

Cause of break uncertain

Officials said they did not know what caused the break, which hit the cable off the coast of the Japanese city of Yokohama at around 8 a.m. local time.

A boat has already departed from Japan to repair the cable and investigations into the cause have begun, according to Xinhua news agency, which reported that repairs would take two weeks.

China Telecom, which plans a multi-billion dollar stock listing in Hong Kong and New York this year, is diverting some traffic through satellites to help alleviate the jam, a second official at the company said.

Although that did allow some access to overseas sites, speeds were slower than usual, the official said.

Singapore Telecommunications said the cable break had slowed traffic over its networks.

"We've had some traffic that goes through this cable," a Singtel spokesman told Reuters. "We've had to divert."

Taiwan's state phone company, Chunghwa Telecom also reported that a broken submarine cable was preventing Internet service providers from connecting to servers off the island.

It, too, was trying to switch traffic to satellites.

It was not immediately clear if the same cable break caused the problems on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

A careless fisherman?

Some Chinese Internet companies reported difficulties overcoming the roadblock on the Information Highway, putting them at risk of losing page views that drive advertising sales. Many domestic companies, for example, locate computer servers overseas.

"Our programmers have to make long distance calls in order to work on the site," said Porter Erisman, marketing vice president for popular electronic commerce portal Alibaba.com, whose programmers are based in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

Some Web users in Hong Kong also said they experienced slower-than-usual online speeds.

"All this talk about the Information Revolution -- it can all be brought to its knees by a shark," said Steve Yap, spokesman for Internet research firm Iamasia in Hong Kong.

While a shark is probably not the culprit, fishermen might be to blame. A report on Chinese portal www.sina.com.cn speculated that a trawler may have inadvertently snapped the cable.

Reuters contributed to this report.