Telecom companies struggle to restore connections

Asia was slowly recovering yesterday from one of the biggest telecommunication outages to hit the region in years as crews scrambled to rig up new phone and Internet networks to replace those snapped by Tuesday night's earthquake off southern Taiwan.

Although stock markets in the region functioned normally, access to overseas Web sites remained patchy, as did dialling telephone numbers across Southeast Asia and in the US.

Millions of people dependent on the Internet for news, stock prices and e-mail were reminded of life before the World Wide Web.

Telecommunications operators in Taiwan and Hong Kong warned that completely solving the problem could take three weeks.

At least six undersea cables which pass near Taiwan are broken and a seventh is damaged, said Au Man-ho, director general of Hong Kong's Office of Telecommunications Authority.

"If only one cable is damaged, the impact will be insignificant," Au said. "All seven cables are damaged. That has not happened before."

Four cable ships rented by Chunghwa Telecom Co should arrive off southern Taiwan -- where the company's two damaged undersea cables are located -- by Tuesday, a secretary to Chunghwa vice president Leng Tai-feng (冷台芬) said by telephone last night.

The secretary said the company is working with other operators to fix the cables damaged by the 6.7-magnitude quake that killed two people. The cables would take at least two weeks to fix, she said.

The crews would need to find the fault, survey the conditions and pull up the cables for repair, Lin Jen-hung (林仁紅), vice-general manager of Chunghwa, said earlier yesterday.

Renting the cable-repair ships will cost US$25,000 per boat per day, Chunghwa said. It said boats would be coming from Yokohama, Busan, Manila and Singapore.

Chunghwa said that most of its overseas phone and Internet services were restored by renting capacities from other telecom operators or rerouting traffic to alternate communications lanes.

As of press time, Chunghwa said 80 percent of its overseas phone service was restored, while only one-third of phone calls to some Southeastern Asian nations were connecting. But Internet service was fully recovered, it said.

Chunghwa said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange that its revenues would drop about NT$100 million (US$3.06 million) because of the disruptions. It would also have to pay about NT$50 million to repair the cables and rent cable capacities.

Meanwhile, China Telecom, China's largest fixed-line operator, said the disruption in the cables was causing severe Internet congestion in that country.

Six of 10 international cables connecting South Korea were affected, according to KT Corp, that country's largest phone company. But KT said more than half of its 92 damaged lines should be fixed by last night.

Hong Kong said its roaming and long-distance phone service was restored. Officials said five maintenance ships had been sent out to repair the cables.

Japan's major carriers said most of their international and fixed-line phone services were back up.