Undersea cable strife immerses BigPond - News - Communications

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Undersea cable strife immerses BigPond

By Rachel Lebihan, ZDNet Australia
February 11, 2002
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Undersea-cable-strife-immerses-BigPond/0,130061791,120263388,00.htm

Some BigPond customers are facing delays accessing international Web sites, following damage to Telstra's main cable out of Australia, SEA-ME-WE-3.

A Telstra spokesperson told ZDNet Australia that he received an e-mail alert at about 9.30pm last Wednesday, which revealed a suspected -shunt fault" 50-60km from Tuas - a cable station in Singapore. A shunt fault is reported whenever water gets into the network and the fault was suspected to have been caused by sandmining operations in the vicinity.

According to the telco titan, service was restored within 12 seconds with all traffic diverted to other cables. The spokesperson said the Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) pipe, which was commissioned just before Christmas, would probably bear the brunt of most of the re-routed traffic.

Telstra said it had received customer calls regarding slow access times between 6pm and 9.30pm on Saturday and between 4.30pm and 8.30pm on Sunday and emphasised that delays could be caused by "other factors" inlcuding customers' own home set-up.

A message on Telstra's service status page today warning users of possible delays accessing international sites was a -just in case" precaution, according to the spokesperson. -It's not saying there are delays, just saying there could be," he pointed out. -All traffic has been restored, if they haven't had delays so far they're unlikely to hereon in."

However, Dan Warne of Australian broadband user community Whirlpool described this as a -distorted truth", saying the Bigpond Broadband network was -basically useless" for most of the weekend, with simple Web pages taking up to a five minutes to load.

"Traffic from the US was returning at about 5k over the weekend (and still is) -- hardly the broadband service advertised which is meant to deliver around 64k per second on the average plan," Warne said.

-It's bad that Telstra does not have better redundant links, this is the fourth time in about a year that the SEA-ME-WE3 cable has been severed and it's time that Telstra bought some good quality alternative bandwidth on protected networks..." he added.

Telstra was hammered by underseas cable problems last year when the SEA-ME-WE-3 cable and China-US cable were broken simultaneously when a tanker, caught in a typhoon, dragged its anchor in an attempt to slow itself down.

Such problems -happen all the time, it's one of those things," Telstra's spokesperson said. Telstra believes it has adequate cables that can serve as back-ups in times of stress. One such spare cable, Jasuraus, takes traffic to Singapore via an alternative route before transferring it to the APCN2 cable.

A repair ship, the CS Iris, has been commissioned to carry out restoration of the flawed cable and is awaiting permission from Indonesian authorities to go into the area tomorrow and repair the fault, according to Telstra.

The Telstra spokesperson said that as some areas around cables are protected from sandmining and dredging, if illegal operations were the cause of the problem it would -seek to recover costs".