Undersea cable to be fixed soon

By Wang Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-30 08:40

The undersea cable that was damaged by Typhoon Marakot last month is expected to be fully repaired by early October, according to an executive of China Telecom.

Access to websites based in the United States and some Asian countries stopped or slowed in the middle of August for many Chinese Internet users, after the typhoon hit Taiwan on Aug 9, causing undersea landslides in the following weeks.

That affected many Internet services in China such as Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger.

Han Yihu, managing director of China Telecom's international business department, said all of its disrupted undersea cables are expected to be fully repaired in early October.

According to Han, about 80 percent of the workload on the undersea cables is for Internet-related business. The rest is used by other businesses such as special telephone lines and virtual private network businesses. Long-distance calls accounted for only about 1 percent of the cable's capacity.

Han said most of the undersea cable networks automatically reroute to their own backup network when the network goes down. The process takes a few minutes and users can hardly notice the relocation.

"But if the whole cable network has been heavily damaged, telecom carriers then rent other carrier's networks during the emergency, which often takes a few days to a week before a deal is reached," Han said.

He said the full repair of the undersea cables usually takes two to three weeks, depending on circumstances such as weather conditions, location of the disrupted lines and how badly the cable was damaged.

Han said about 90 percent of China Telecom's international network capacity comes from undersea cables that connect China to North America, Europe, South Africa and other countries in Asia.

"After the network disruption this time, we may consider re-arranging our new cable lines to avoid high-risk regions such as the Bashi Channel where natural disasters prevail," Han said.