I can’t post a thing. I can’t view a lot of pages, I can only go to SingNet (my ISP) web page and SingNet is still happily promoting their 5Mbps broadband plan. I called SingNet and the technical support is engage. You know what that tells me? Too many people are calling the technical support lines to enquire about the new 5Mbps connection.
Turns out that there is an earthquake at around 7.1 at Hengchun and it damaged some cables, namely SeaMeWe 3 (South East Asia Middle East Western Europe 3) and APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2) undersea cables.
(SeaMeWe3 and Taiwan earthquake superimposed. Click on image to enlarge.)
The red thing that I drew supposed to be an earthquake, it looks kinda distorted. The blue portions are SingTel undersea cable network South East Asia Middle East Western Europe 3 (SeaMeWe3).
The earthquake disrupted internet access in places like China and Singapore. Ships have been dispatched from both Taiwan and Hong Kong to repair the damaged cables. Engineers said that process could take two to three weeks, although most people will see services back to normal before then.
Source: BBC, ComputerWorld and SeaMeWe3.
I’m quite upset with SingTel’s service quality. They did not place a note online regarding this service disruption until yesterday evening. They should have put in their news or something. Surely this is big enough news right? And their technical support line is engaged too. That should not be happening.
By the way, everyone’s talking about their home internet, no YouTube, no Yahoo!, Hotmail gone. Perhaps they kinda forgotten what’s an earthquake? It’s the ground-shifting moment when people get hurt. Why’s nobody talking about death tolls and restoration efforts in Taiwan?
Possibly related:
- Taiwanese fighter jet crashes, kills 2 Singapore soldiers
- taiwan//trip
- Why the Chinese Earthquake Test Centers fail
Tags: bittorrent, china, death, internet, news, singapore, singtel
Yes, I have heard about the quake and the communication problems in the news.
I am sorry to hear that.
Skype has opened a help thread to maintain communication for effected areas. More about this can be seen on Skype’s English blog on which Jaanus Kase posted, here.
They take error reports very serious. I have reported connection problems myself in past which got fixed in a rush.
by Nafcom (Dec 29, 2006 at 2 AM)Nafcom: There are numerous Taiwanese affected, so far I heard there are 2 deaths. Skype wouldn’t be able to help much in this in my opinion. I kinda think that some sort of telco partnership has to be involve to alleviate the current network problems.
Hopefully the network would recover sooner. I’ll be going into camp soon so hopefully, by the time I get out, the internet would be ready for me to YouTube around, hahaa…
by Mr. Dew (Dec 29, 2006 at 2 AM)@Mr. Dew well, they monitor it and write something about it on their Heartbeat site:
http://heartbeat.skype.com/
by Nafcom (Dec 30, 2006 at 8 PM)