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As mentioned earlier, there have been severe disruptions to the Asian internet connectivity due to the Taiwan earthquake in late December. As connectivity is still quite slow I checked on the Net how the status of the repair is…

So here is the current situation of the pacific cables:

• The South-East Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 3 (SMW3) system is stated to be restored by GMANews while China’s Daily News says, that it is subject of repair. This ultimate long-distance system with 10000km range carries up to 505 Gbit via DWDM and had been damaged close to the Taiwan landing site.
• The Asia-Pacific Cable Network (APCN) seems to be still damaged and is to be repaired in February.
• The same applies to the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2), which suffers from a submarine cable fault between Shantou, China and Tanshui, Taiwan and between Lantau, Hongkong and Chongming, China. APCN2 has a capacity of up to 2.56Tbit/s.
• The Fiber-Optic Link acroos the globe (FLAG) suffers also from a double-damage. The Fiber North-Asian Loop (FNAL) linking Korea, Hong Kong , Taiwan cable broke between Hong Kong and Pusan, while the FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) broke between Hong Kong and Shanghai. This system seems to be still damaged.
• The China US Cable (CUCN) network seems to be restored.

So Situation remains quite unclear. AFP reports, that situation is close-to-normal, but I disagree with that. Finally the Henchun earthquake shows, that even the “fault-proof” Internet protocol is not really perfect when all routes go through a single bottleneck.

To be precise: Almost all communication from Asia to Europe (and US) runs via the Pacific Ocean even though shorter links via the middle-east are present. This was also obeserved by CyTrap. As seen in the global submarine cable map the actual bandwidth linking South-East Asia via the Middle-East or Russia is quite low…

So Singapore suffered from severage outages even that the direct fiber-links to Europe were NOT affected at all! There is really a need for some direct routes via Middle-East in order to ensure a fault-protection and reduce impact of such one-spot failures as just seen. Additionally this way physically shorter, which results in lower delays. But of course the US-based Tier1 providers are not interested in such upgrades.

So the situation remains like this: Like flying via San Francisco / New York when you want to get from Singapore to Frankfurt…