Faulty Asian cable slows Internet access - News - Communications

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Faulty Asian cable slows Internet access

By Irene Tham, special to ZDNet
December 31, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Faulty-Asian-cable-slows-Internet-access/0,130061791,120262621,00.htm

As torrential rain kept people indoors in Singapore late last week, surfing the Internet proved to be little help in staving off boredom.

A fault in the Asia Pacific Cable Network (APCN)--a 12,000km undersea fiber-optic cable which links Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand--slowed Internet traffic for several hours Thursday.

APCN, which was completed in 1996, is owned by a regional consortium which includes Australia's Reach Communications and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (SingTel).

A SingTel spokesperson cited "shipping activities" as a possible cause for the cable failure.

The damage was reported at around 1.40pm (local time), about 40km off Changi in the eastern part of Singapore, said Reach and SingTel. Some Internet users in Singapore could not access Web sites hosted overseas, admitted the SingTel spokesperson.

IP (Internet Protocol) customers in Jakarta were affected too, Reach spokesperson Martin Ratia noted, "but there was no reported impact on Australian customers."

Both telecommunications firms said they took immediate steps to redirect Internet traffic to other regional cable systems, such as SEA-ME-WE 3 and the newly-launched APCN 2.

"To minimise impact on customers, all restorable traffic was re-routed within hours of the fault being reported--some of the Singapore-Hong Kong traffic was restored within an hour," Reach's Ratia claimed.

"An investigation coordinated by Reach and SingTel is underway to determine the full extent of the cable fault, while repair work begins," the SingTel spokesperson said, but could not provide further details.

SingTel also stressed that Internet services were back to normal operating levels on Friday morning.