Sometime last night there were a series of major submarine cable cuts to the Asia Pacific region, somewhere around Taiwan.

These cable systems are important for the communication of the Asia Pacific region, if you live in Taiwan or Hong Kong, the Internet today may not be as snappy as you’re used to. Luckily, so far there are no reports of complete outage.

The cuts so far are on the cable systems: C2C, APCN2, and EAC. I’ve put together a very basic map (accurate enough to get a general feel) of the confirmed cuts:

Background Map Provided by Google Maps

There are other reports of issues on the other major systems SMW2 and SMW3. Both SMW2 and SMW3 were cut December 19th 2008 and were down for over a week. However, current reports about these systems may be due to traffic congestion (load from the other systems failing over).

The remaining systems, TGN and FLAG cable systems also are running well as of now.

So far there are no reports on the cause of the damage to the systems, yet the speculation is typhoon Morakot. I wish the men and women working on routing around them and fixing them good luck!

Update: Suspected cause

Debris flows damage undersea cables off southeastern Taiwan
Taipei, Aug. 12 (CNA) Deepsea debris flows off southeastern Taiwan, which were triggered by Typhoon Morakot, seriously damaged undersea cables and disrupted Internet services between Taiwan, China and Southeast Asia, according to Taiwan’s main telecommunications company.”

Update: Intra-Asia Cable (IAC)

As another important note, The Intra-Asia Cable (IAC) system from Tata Communications (the only system in the region which has planned a route not passing thru the earthquake prone region around Taiwan) was also one of the few systems up and running in the region the entire time.

To learn more, check out these links:

• Images of the World’s Submarine Cable Systems
• Submarine Communications Cables

Tags: Cable Systems, Fiber Cut

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 7:47 am and is filed under Cable Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.