GMail access is OK now.
And how dependent we have become....Asian Internet, Phone Services Hit by Taiwan Quakes (Update2)
By Tim Culpan and Andrea Tan
Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Internet and telephone services across Asia were disrupted, hampering financial transactions, after earthquakes near Taiwan damaged undersea cables.
``The repairs could take two to three weeks,'' said Leng Tai-feng, president of Chunghwa Telecom Co.'s international business. The Taipei-based company, Taiwan's largest phone operator, said two of its undersea cables were cut.
A series of earthquakes, including a magnitude 7.1 tremor, struck Taiwan last night and today, killing at least two people and cutting power supplies. HSBC Holdings Plc said its online banking services were down, while Chunghwa said almost no calls could be made to Southeast Asia, causing disruption to companies including First State Investments in Singapore.
``I can't trade if I don't know the prices,'' said David Leong, who heads the Singapore trading desk at First State, which manages $15 billion in equities in Asia and emerging markets. ``I've put in limit orders to try to minimize the damage, but even then you need to have the basic information.''
Chunghwa said voice calls to the U.S. are down to 40 percent of normal capacity, while calls to China are down to 10 percent, and 11 percent for Japan. Hong Kong's PCCW Ltd. said it only had 50 percent of its telephone capacity in the region and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., Southeast Asia's largest phone company, reported Internet traffic was hindered.
HSBC spokeswoman Vinh Tran in Hong Kong said there was no access for its online banking service in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.
Time for an insurance company to roll out an internet insurance along with some top level / multi-route backbones.
Good thing this happened after xmas. Would have been devastating for online retailers.
Seems everything is still on the restoration route.. My home broadband is still being routed to UK (via FLAG Telecom) =( Hope the APCN and other submarine cables gets restored soon..
After all this time, my internet is still not quite back to normal. On some days, it is fine, just as fast as it ever was. But other times (like right now ), the download speed seems to be capped at about 700 kbps - a far cry from the 6.5 Mbps I usually get!
This is really getting frustrating. How long does it take to fix some stupid cables? Can't PCCW just buy bandwidth from another provider? Is there really that little bandwidth available???
The fibre optic links between Hong Kong and Taiwan (Which are the usual data path to North America) are still down. They latest estimates for repair run well into February. The internet traffic in the mean time has been diverted through alternate channels, but these channels were not designed to feed HKG/ASIA. If you imagine closing down a major highway and detouring all traffic on alternate routes, the slowdown is somewhat expected. Once the links are restored I trust the ISPs in Hong Kong will be back up to speed.