Any Progress On International Internet Links?

[Crushdepth]

Anyone have an update on the repair of the internet links off Taiwan? Thanks.

[sabajja]

Heard it would take until February.

Problem is the cables are at Crushdepth

[Tywais]

From iTWire

"2 more weeks for undersea Internet cable repair

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Tuesday, 16 January 2007

A China Daily report says underwater cable repairs after the undersea Taiwan earthquake could still take 2 weeks to complete."

Since two weeks will be this Tuesday and this article indicates sometime next month due to discovering more damage and needing to bring more cable in from the taiwan, around mid-february.

[Tywais]

One other thing, don't be surprised that you have Internet problems for a few days after the final repair as the re-routed routers are configured back to their original routing configurations.

[spot]

We got an SMS yesterday from true-con which said that the international connection problem was fixed and internet is running as normal.

Excitedly, I ran to my computer to tell you all and................

I couldn't connect to thaivisa

but hey, I'm not complaining.....the foods still great

[Thaising]

Until now, I don't see any improvement on the internet speed since the earthquake. Hopefully they can get the whole things up and running ASAP.

[bkk_mike]

Ping times to the UK are back in the 300-400ms range on my True connection (which is where they were before the earthquakes).

A lot better than the 1.2 seconds I was getting around New Year, but still pretty bad. (but at least it's back to just the usual dire, rather than the absolutely f**king awful that we were getting).

Has anybody else noticed an issue recently where their internet is acting weirdly... - After a few hours, if I ping the UK, I get cycles of 5 pings working, then 3 timeouts, then 5 pings working, 3 timeouts, over and over. (using a straight ping -t in Windows XP - default packet sizes, and timeouts).

It's far too regular to be some "real" problem out on the far side of the Internet, so I can only assume it's either a problem with my router (doubtful - web still works, and my VPN connection to the server I'm pinging doesn't go down), or with True's software. (Goes back to normal if I restart my router, i.e. get a new IP address).

[TheStache]

Ping times to the UK are back in the 300-400ms range on my True connection (which is where they were before the earthquakes).

A lot better than the 1.2 seconds I was getting around New Year, but still pretty bad. (but at least it's back to just the usual dire, rather than the absolutely f**king awful that we were getting).

I wish I could Ping and Tracert, but it looks to be blocked. I have a WIFI account thru the apartment building. I think its a true connection.

Pings all timeout and a tracert ends here " 203-144-143-73.static.asianet.co.th " with only timeouts from there forward. Anybody know of any alternative tests or a solution.

Has anybody else noticed an issue recently where their internet is acting weirdly... - After a few hours, if I ping the UK, I get cycles of 5 pings working, then 3 timeouts, then 5 pings working, 3 timeouts, over and over. (using a straight ping -t in Windows XP - default packet sizes, and timeouts).

I thought that's the way all internet connections worked in Thailand, ie wierdly!

[Momo8]

At 20:26 on December 26 a 7.1-magnitude quake struck in the Luzon Straits between Philippines and Taiwan, damaging the fibre-optic cable network that links the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong with Taiwan and the United States. Digital traffic suddenly defaulted to routes through Europe with the sudden and massive demand causing the system to completely crash.

The hundreds of thousands of Chinese teens chatting on MSN were cut off. There was no more Yahoo! Mail, no more MySpace.com, no more scanning English football results or searching for pictures of Britney Spears.

Most of Asia woke up without email or the Internet and, in some places, without telephone connections - cut off from the rest of the world. Any Web site hosted outside the country vanished from Chinese cyberspace for two days and remained slow for weeks after.

Important sites such as banks, international news Web sites, trading platforms and Bloomberg and Reuters' financial data systems were all inaccessible. Scenes at the Hong Kong stock exchange were chaotic as traders frantically fielded calls from investors who could not access prices or trade stock.

The losses of day traders, who hold stock for short periods of time, are estimated to have run into the millions of dollars. They need up-to-the-minute prices on the shares they are trading. Yet most were unable to access this information from either the stock exchange portal, whose servers are based in Taiwan, or the trading platforms of brokerage firms such as Goldman Sachs, Merril Lynch or Morgan Stanley, whose Hong Kong portals are almost all hosted in America.

Even selling was difficult. With online trading out of action, investors had to depend on brokers on the floor. This wouldn't have been a problem 20 years ago, but now each trader could be responsible for up to 3,000 accounts.

The sudden jolt back in time was felt by many.

Peter Hatz, Director of Investment Strategy at Hong Kong-based Panaoramic Asset Management, had about 20 open investments for his clients on the London Stock Exchange. For two days, he had no access to London prices: "I had my broker in London phone me every half hour with prices. It made me feel like how my Dad must have felt. It's quite fun actually, it gives you a real sense of trading."

Normally Panoramic's software will automatically buy and sell stock when it reaches a certain price, leaving no chance for inaccuracy. "It makes you realize how technology has allowed the markets to grow so quickly over the last 10 to 15 years," said Hatz. "Because of technology, the markets are now spot on."

But it wasn't just the markets that felt the shake.

Foreign buyers who count on the online import and export marketplace Alibaba.com to source Chinese products couldn't make the orders they needed, with those that could get through conducting business using fax machines instead. Tom.com, which recently acquired eBay China, posted an announcement on its front pages with instructions on how to log in through an agent server. Meanwhile, eBay.com sellers were unable to communicate with Asian members who had bought their goods, and buyers in Asia missed out on closing auctions.

JFK Miller, the editor of China-based press digest magazine NVR, depends entirely upon access to the Web sites of international newspapers and magazines in order to choose and compare how each is covering the big stories each fortnight. "The irony was that the story I knew we really had to cover - namely the Internet going down in Asia - was the very story which we couldn't find out what the foreign papers were saying about it," he said. Until the Internet came back online, he depended on foreign freelancers and the limited print editions he could get hold of. Had the earthquake come a week later, the magazine could not have been produced on time..

Others have not been so fortunate.

Chinese owners of over 10,000 dot com addresses lost their domain names when they were unable to re-register them on expiry.

Peter Nielson, a freelance translator based in Guangzhou, depends entirely on the Internet to get work. "If I don't have it, I cannot live," he said. In the days following the quake he could not receive the work he had been commissioned to translate by one company into any of his three email accounts. Another of his regular clients, ISO Translation, requires him to log on to an Internet platform in order to pitch for and download work. "I could reach the server but the connection wasn't strong enough for it to work." Nielsen said he has lost about half of his normal income this month as a result. But this is the least of his worries: "The connection is still not good enough and my biggest concern is that I will lose the relationship I have built up with this company. That's the worst risk, losing your customers."

Loa Horrace, Managing Director of iOneNet, one of the many Hong Kong-based ecommerce websites that are hosted in the U.S., says that he had lost around US$20,000 worth of custom by mid-January and that the slow connection is costing his business between US$1,000 and US$2,000 a day. The situation could make this small company bankrupt if connection speeds are not restored soon.

The problems have led to an open debate about whether the Chinese mainland should be so dependent on undersea links to Taiwan and America, and why more Web sites are not hosted on a local server. Before December 26, few people were aware of just how many Chinese Web sites are actually hosted on the other side of the Pacific. China's Internet population grew by a third last year to 132 million, making it the second largest in the world after the United States and it is hot on its heels to become the largest in the very near future. So it seems slightly odd that it should be so dependent on American servers.

Henry Chan, Chairman of the Hong Kong Stockbrokers Association, is calling on the government to help set up more Internet hosting in China. "This would solve the problem better than laying down more cables," he said.

According to Mark Natkin, Managing Director of Marrbridge Consulting, a Beijing-based Internet consultancy, there are two reasons why so many Web sites are hosted in America: "It has historically been simpler to register your Web site overseas, so it is partly a legacy issue. But then there is also people's perception of their information rights. Regulation of the Internet can change quite suddenly in countries outside of the United States and businesses don't want to be open to that risk," he said. "It's in China's best interests to convince people that it's better to register here. And it seems to be successfully doing so already. The number of Chinese hosted domains is increasing quite comfortably."

But with plans already in place for new cabling linking the Chinese mainland directly with the U.S. to provide 60 times the current capacity by the end of 2008, many businesses will be weighing up their options carefully.

But there are still plenty of reasons to host locally. According to industry experts, domestic bandwidth has been increasing at a much faster rate in China than international bandwidth. And those Web sites who were able to ride out the earthquake won a lot of traffic that would normally have gone elsewhere. The hugely popular messenger service MSN completely crashed for three days, sending subscription numbers at China-based alternative Tencent QQ through the roof. The world is supposed to be a smaller place right now, but using local services may just be more effective than ever before.

AND......NOBODY IS SURE EXACTLY WHEN THE PROBLEM WILL BE FIXED, I would not hold my breath until after the Chinese New Year at least is what is being "predicted" in the local Chinese,HK newspapers and websites.

[cloudhopper]

Nice post Momo.

Can't get into Yahoo at all this pm and in country traffic is slow from here in MHS province via TOT DSL gold.

[astral]

TM Malaysia says all is repaired and back to normal........

[nikster]

Nice post Momo.

Can't get into Yahoo at all this pm and in country traffic is slow from here in MHS province via TOT DSL gold.

I think TOT is dead in the north at the moment. Getting 2 second pings and horrible horrific download speeds right now. Went from Chiang Mai to Pai, MHS province today and both places had horrible internet speeds, yet others around the country seem to have good speeds. Come to think of it, they probably get the good international speeds because most TOT users in the north are basically offline

I called TOT to upgrade my line but they told me that they are working on it and expect it to be fixed by the evening. E.g. I hope 9pm.

FWIW they offered me 2Mbit line, 3Mbit and 4Mbit, all pretty expensive business lines.

[astral]

FWIW they offered me 2Mbit line, 3Mbit and 4Mbit, all pretty expensive business lines.

What prices??