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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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Telstra: cable damage 'worse' By Byron Kaye, ZDNet News November 27, 2000 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/Telstra-cable-damage-worse-/0,139023165,120107231,00.htm
The damage done to Telstra's international undersea cable last week was -more extensive than anticipated," according to a spokesman for the ISP. A repair ship sent out took longer than expected to find the damage because the accident had caused both ends of the severed cable to whiplash in various directions, Telstra public affairs manager Stuart Gray said. The repair ship had located both ends of the cable around 60 kilometres from the Singapore coastline, but technicians discovered they needed to replace a trashed -repeater", a component that maintains the integrity of signals sent through the cable, Gray said. The additional cost and replacement time to replace the component were unknown, Telstra said. After replacing the repeater, the ship would take around 20 hours to -splice together" the cable, Gray said. Nevertheless, Telstra expects its Bigpond ISP service will be fully restored around Tuesday this week. Gray said Australia was the most affected nation in South East Asia because the country's network was structured so that most Telstra users relied on the cable to log onto overseas Web sites. ZDNet Asia reported that less than 25 percent of Indonesia's Internet traffic relied on the cable, and that most of that country's ISPs used satellite transmissions to channel their Internet traffic. The 37,000-kilometre underwater cable, which connects Australia with Asia, the Middle East and Europe, normally holds around 60 percent of Telstra's international Web traffic. The 650,000-customer ISP last week claimed it was running at 75 percent network capacity by rerouting traffic to alternative channels. Gray said the ISP had upped that slightly by pooling together more alternative bundles of capacity, known as -bearers". Immediately after the cable was sliced last Monday, Telstra reported it was running at only 30 percent normal network capacity. The exact cause of the accident is still not known. The cost of the repair to Telstra is expected to be negligible because the bill is jointly footed by the consortium of 90 companies worldwide that owns the cable.
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