Surfers wait amid rush to fix cable

The $1.3 billion China-U.S. cable was severed somewhere off the coast of Shanghai. enlarge map

By Nic Hopkins
CNN.com Writer

HONG KONG, China -- Internet users in northern Asia face another three weeks of slow surfing thanks to a broken cable linking China and the U.S.

Members of the consortium that own the cable say it could be up to 23 days before the China-United States Cable Network is repaired after being damaged Friday, strangling connection speeds across Greater China.

Meanwhile, analysts say the breakage underscores the fragility of Internet infrastructure in Asia, placing the onus on data centers and Internet service providers not to put all their bandwidth in one basket.

Darcy Hausselman, a spokeswoman for Concert -- a joint venture between British Telecom and U.S.-based AT&T that owns a key stake in the China-US cable -- says the task of fixing the break has fallen on China Telecom.

"It may be difficult to know exactly how long it will take until the damage can be assessed," says Hausselman. "I believe that China Telecom has estimated 23 days at this point. It will depend on various factors such as water depth and weather."

Rush for alternate routes

The cable stretches from two points in China across the Pacific, via Taiwan and Japan, to two landing points in the U.S.

As ISPs and data carriers scramble to shift their bandwidth requirements to other carriers, sources say a repair boat will be dispatched to a point some 320 km from Chong Ming Island off the coast of Shanghai, where the cable is thought to have broken.

"I don't think it is possible to know how the cable broke until the repair ship arrives, which should be over the next few days," says Hausselman.

Ownership of the $1.3 billion cable is split between a host of international cable and telecommunications companies.

They comprise Concert, China Telecom, Chunghwa Telecom, Hong Kong's Pacific Century CyberWorks, Japan's KDDI, Korea Telecom, MCI Communications, NTT Worldwide Network, SBC Communications, Singapore Telecom, Sprint., Teleglobe USA, Telekom Malaysia and Australia's Telstra.

A backbone prone to fractures

The break -- not the first for the US-China cable -- comes just weeks after a similar incident in the heavily shipped waters off Singapore, in which a cable linking several markets across South East Asia was severed.

In both cases, most ISPs and data carriers were able to re-route their traffic through other cables almost instantly, although the drain on the back-up cables slowed connection speeds to a crawl.

"All companies have a redundancy in place so that when a breakage occurs the switch to a back-up system is almost instantaneous," says Gartner analyst Andrew Chetham.

"Spread the risk around"

However, Chetham says there can be lessons learned from both incidents. "The message is simple: Don't put all your eggs in one basket, spread the risk around."

Worst affected by the break of the 80-gigabit cable were companies and consumers in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

"A country like China should not rely on one cable, it needs diversity of cable," says Chetham.

A number of wholesale bandwidth providers have promised to invest more in Asia's Internet "backbone" including Reach, a joint venture between Hong Kong's Pacific Century CyberWorks and Telstra.

Also arriving on the scene are U.S.-backed firms Asia Global Crossing and Level 3 Communications.

"There's a lot of bandwidth out there -- I think 12 cables crossing the Pacific, and there will be more to come," says Chetham. "Also, I'd say that in the not too distant future we will see more data hosted locally, and so less of a reliance on such long-distance cable."

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Welcome to Concert
News Release: March 31, 1997

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