Wall Street Journal | March 14, 2011 | Owen Fletcher and Juro Osawa
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
BEIJING (Dow Jones)–Asia’s major telecom operators scrambled on Monday to eliminate the impact on their operations from damage to several submarine cables following the massive earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan on Friday.
Many telecom operators and users were reporting some disruptions in Internet access Monday, though the partial restoration of service was accomplished by rerouting traffic over undamaged cables and via satellites.
About half of the existing cables running across the Pacific are damaged and “a lot of people are feeling a little bit of slowing down of Internet traffic going to the United States,” said Bill Barney, chief executive of Hong Kong-based cable-network operator Pacnet. He declined to name the damaged cables operated by other companies, but said Pacnet’s cable system connecting Japan to the U.S. isn’t damaged so far.
Most international Internet data and voice phone calls are transmitted as pulses of light via the hundreds of undersea fiber optic cables that crisscross the globe. The cables, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, are typically owned by consortia of telecom companies, who share costs and capacity. While the clusters of glass fibers are enclosed in protective material, they remain vulnerable to undersea earthquakes, fishing trawlers and ship anchors. There are also many choke points around the globe where a number of key cables converge.
While the extent of the damage to undersea cables is still unclear and financial losses unknown, operators said they are undergoing an inspection and looking to expedite restoration.
Pacnet aims within five to seven days to repair two damaged segments of its East Asia Crossing network connecting Japan to other parts of Asia, like Taiwan and Hong Kong, Barney said. He played down concerns about any financial impact on Pacnet or regional telecom operators from the damaged cables.
“It’s in our business plan that our cables will break, typically you get cuts in cables anywhere from five to 10 times a year,” even though the damage on land after Japan’s earthquake has drawn extra attention, Barney said.
Japanese telecom operator KDDI Corp. (9433.TO) said Monday one of its undersea cables between Japan and the U.S. has been damaged by the earthquake and is unable to transmit any signals, but a spokesman said the company didn’t know if the cable was cut or having connection problems.
The damaged part is far offshore, and it may take a while for KDDI to identify and address the problem but services are recovering after the quake, as the company can bypass the damaged part and use other cables instead, the spokesman said.
Pacific Crossing, a unit of Japan’s NTT Communications Corp. that operates a cable network between Japan and the U.S., said Monday the Pacific Crossing PC-1 W and PC-1 N parts of its network remained out of service due to the earthquake.
NTT Communications said some of its services for enterprises were partially unavailable in Japan’s Tohoku region, but that for submarine cables between Japan, other parts of Asia and the U.S. the company is using backup cable routes.
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