Taiwan Quake Disrupts Philippine Internet

No wonder I couldn’t get any work done before lunch yesterday.

Taiwan quake disrupts RP Internet, telephone connections
By Erwin Oliva

The Philippines’ links to the Internet were damaged following a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck Taiwan early Wednesday.

“These are major submarine cables linking the Philippines to the United States. We said earlier that it was only the Internet but apparently it has affected international voice calls,” John Rojo, head of corporate communications of Bayantel, in a telephone interview.

Rojo said this major service interruption has affected its own service nationwide. But local Internet and telephone traffic have remained stable.

“We’re now working on re-routing our international traffic and coordinating on the restoration of our international services. This is what we’re focusing on right now,” the telecom executive said.

Rojo added that as of 3 p.m., 90 percent of Bayantel’s international traffic have been operational.

The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. and Smart Communications also confirmed the impact of the Taiwan earthquake on their own Internet and telephone services in a joint statement.

“The international cable facilities being utilized by PLDT and Smart have suffered major cable breaks due to the recent earthquake that took place near Taiwan. As a result, IDD (international direct dialing) and broadband Internet services are currently intermittent. Domestic PLDT & Smart voice and data services are operating normally,” the companies said.

PLDT added that the international consortium operating these submarine cable systems “has already mobilized cable ships to repair the affected segments, and restoration work is being conducted round the clock.”

“In the meantime, we are maximizing the use of available international linkages and finding alternative routes to hasten restoration of normal service,” PLDT and Smart said.

The major downtime started around 11 a.m., Wednesday, Manila time. It lasted for about one hour.

Wilson Chua, Internet Service Provider owner, said that there was “massive damage” in the international links.

He said that APCN1, APCN2, EAC, and C2C were affected in the earthquake. These are international optical fiber submarine cables linking the Philippines to international networks.

Chua said his connection to at least four major telecommunications firms — Globe Telecommunications, BayanTel, Digitel, and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. — had been down for about an hour.

Officials of Digitel, and Globe could not be reached for comment as of posting time.

Internet cafes in Manila visited by INQUIRER.net were closed due to the service interruptions this morning.

The Internet services are back to normal in Metro Manila as of posting time, but connections speeds are still slow and intermittent.

A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the southern Taiwanese town of Hengchun Wednesday, killing two and triggering a regional tsunami alert.

I bash PLDT when they deserve it (and I still bypass their lousy DNS servers), but I have to give my ISP credit where credit is due: my connection has been running fine since after lunch yesterday.

First a quake hits Taiwan, then the Philippines is plunged into data darkness in midday, and now I’m saying something nice about an entrenched telco giant. The end of the world is near.

(Via Jepoy.)

Update, December 28, 1:20p GMT+8: Okay, now I can’t get to some sites. Maybe the world isn’t ending after all.

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