SINET warns of underwater cable damage, slow internet

[TheAppletons]

I received a text message from my ISP (SINET) yesterday warning me that, due to underwater cable damage, my internet service speeds may be slower at times while repairs are ongoing. According to the text, the cable damage is between Hong Kong and Singapore and is expected to take 3-4 weeks to repair. SINET also implied it will affect all ISPs (the text said "all the companies" so I'm inferring a bit here.)

Telekom Malaysia issued a similar warning to its customers on 4 March so this appears to be a region-wide problem; their announcement specifically stated:

"During this period, Internet users may experience some degree of service degradation such as slow browsing and high latency while accessing contents hosted in the United States (US), North Asia and Europe via the affected cables."

http://subtelforum.com/articles/update-from-telekom-malaysia-on-restoration-works-to-repair-submarine-cable-fault/

[Crossy]

I'm going to move this to the Tech forum for wider viewing.

Thanks for the heads-up

[mjnaus]

Re-routing, using a VPN for example, through Europe should minimise issues for anyone experiencing them in the first place. I haven't noticed much myself to be honest.

[TheSiemReaper]

Re-routing, using a VPN for example, through Europe should minimise issues for anyone experiencing them in the first place. I haven't noticed much myself to be honest.

I'm sorry but what? Re-routing can only be done by the international cable network. The first leg of which is damaged. You can't avoid speed issues by re-routing via a VPN at all. (Trust me I've worked in telecoms most of my life).

Having said that... my connections are delivering faster data at the moment than they ever have before. I think they may finally have installed working 4G in my area...

[Toxane]

Could this be the reason I'm getting

==> nslookup google.com 8.8.8.8
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

using 3BB for several days now?

[robblok]

Still downloading full speed here 6.5MBps so not affected here on 3bb fiber downloading newsgroups from astraweb. (USA server)

[LivinLOS]

3bb fiber seems fine to me too..

[ChristianBlessing]

I manage our network here in Malaysia (150mbs fiber and radio) and yes, we're experiencing issues with connectivity with US-based services. TM reckons, as OP noted, 3-4 weeks.

[KhunBENQ]

It is a complex task to measure the impact of such a failure.

So don't expect that the failure of your internet connection is easily traceable to this fault.

On one hand it is a quite new (2012) and quite "big" cable (15 Terabit/s).

From what I see it's the second biggest connection from Singapore, another cable is 23 Terabit/s.

(I refer to the source linked below. other sources claim much higher numbers, whom to believe?)

But on the other hand the picture below shows an overview of the cables in the SEA region.

So there is still a lot of routing alternatives which could limit the overall performance degradation.

http://www.cablemap.info/

Better don't think about the impact of catastrophic events in Singapore.

(make up yourself what catastrophic could mean)

ASE is in white color.

Edited March 8, 2016 by KhunBENQ

[KhunBENQ]

Could this be the reason I'm getting

==> nslookup google.com 8.8.8.8
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

using 3BB for several days now?

Likely not. I get a reasonable response on ToT fibre.

Ping is 37 ms, so "in the region" and not directly affected by a sea cable problem.

Edited March 8, 2016 by KhunBENQ

[alocacoc]

3bb is definitely affected. Many issues with connections to US.

[robblok]

3bb is definitely affected. Many issues with connections to US.

I am on 3bb fiber from BKK and download full speed from US servers meaning 6.6 MBps. So not all of 3bb is affected

[pedro01]

Fine here on 3BB

[alocacoc]

3bb is definitely affected. Many issues with connections to US.

I am on 3bb fiber from BKK and download full speed from US servers meaning 6.6 MBps. So not all of 3bb is affected

Unfortunately i can't get fiber. These speedtests shows only the speed. Well, the speed might be fine, but i recognize, that the connection gets interrupt regularly. I use a program which needs a steady data-stream from the US. This program is quite sensitive when it comes to unstable connections. And this became worse lately. I really hope this is caused by the defect undersea-cable.

Again, it's not the speed I'm worry about. It's about the short interruptions.

And yes, DNS 8.8.8.8 is offline for me too.

Another thing, Youtube is loading very slowly. Actually, almost unusable now. I checked it on another browser, same thing. All these issues started at the same time. So, i guess, i can only wait and hope.

Edited March 9, 2016 by alocacoc

[KhunBENQ]

Erratic as so often.

8.8.8.8 stlll easy pingable (47 ms, 10 ms more than yesterday).

I poked around on cnn.com, misc. usa.gov sites, Merriam Webster, walmart without notable problems.

CNN lightning fast (might be a content provider outside USA).

Misc. Swiss websites quite creepy (2 Mbits and below).

Today had a Skype text chat with a friend in Jomtien.

Suddenly he is "yellow", no text coming in.

About a minute later text comes in and some swear word about his internet

He has ToT ADSL in a condo.

I have ToT fibre in the sticks.

Edited March 9, 2016 by KhunBENQ

[JaseTheBass]

3bb is definitely affected. Many issues with connections to US.

I am on 3bb fiber from BKK and download full speed from US servers meaning 6.6 MBps. So not all of 3bb is affected

I am on fibre in Chiang Mai and things are very clunky to some US based sites.

Sent from my SM-T815Y using Tapatalk

[SpaceKadet]

Thanks for the up on this. I see from the announcement that SEA-ME-WE 4 is also affected. That explains flaky connections over the past 10 days or so.

[lemonjelly]

Re-routing, using a VPN for example, through Europe should minimise issues for anyone experiencing them in the first place. I haven't noticed much myself to be honest.

Eerrmmm, no; a vpn won't change your physical location, it's not a TARDIS.

[DaveBKK]

Re-routing, using a VPN for example, through Europe should minimise issues for anyone experiencing them in the first place. I haven't noticed much myself to be honest.

Eerrmmm, no; a vpn won't change your physical location, it's not a TARDIS.

No but it can change the route. Say for example on Fiber cables going through India to Europe rather than the cable through Hong Kong. Routes get overloaded. Using a VPN can help avoid overloaded / problem routes.

[Guest]

I'm using TOT with VPN to Northern America. At the moment my download speed is 150Kbps.

As far as I know, VPN can speed up the browsing experience as VPN can use compression and UDP instead of TCP.

Then again, if the DNS servers are far away, the DNS queries can be quite a lot slower.

[Turkleton]

Ping to my Server in Germany ~600ms + packet loss, usually below 400ms.

Tried to do some Online banking today (German bank), but always got a timeout

At the end, I had to use my German PC via Teamviewer.

I've noticed that creepy speed since 5-6 days.

ToT Fiber 20/10 Mbits

[Lannig]

I'm using TOT with VPN to Northern America. At the moment my download speed is 150Kbps.

As far as I know, VPN can speed up the browsing experience as VPN can use compression and UDP instead of TCP.

Then again, if the DNS servers are far away, the DNS queries can be quite a lot slower.

I very much doubt this (and yes, I'm in that kind of business).

VPN always has to use packet encapsulation of some kind, adding overhead (extra data to the actual payload) that can only slow things down. It also incurs longer paths (more hops).

UDP is not inherently faster than TCP on wide-area networks application-wise. Much to the contrary. TCP is a well-thought protocol with a sliding window for acknowledgments. If you use UDP, you lose all that end-to-end packet handshake so this has to be taken care of by upper protocol layers. I very much doubt that anything much more effective than TCP protocols can be done (one exception to this could be sat links with high latency, something that TCP doesn't handle very well but there are tricks to work around this).

Finally, I don't think that packet compression can change things significantly, given that a large part of the contents sent over usual connections like web browsing or video streaming is already compressed.

Edited March 14, 2016 by Lannig

[bubba]

I do not know exactly why, but for some time now, I find that using VPN really does speed up page loading to US sites on many occasions.