Status of Internet-Earthquake Breakdown

[Gaybutton]

This is the first time I have been able to access Gay Thailand in the past 36 hours. As many of you know, an earthquake in Taiwan has disrupted Internet service throughout Southeast Asia. The latest reports tell us that in Thailand full service should be restored within the next five days.

 

I was able to get in now, obviously, but the web site was extremely slow to load on this end. I'm glad we can get in at all and I hope things will be back to normal very soon.

 

There are still a number of web sites either inaccessible or only partially accessible for us in Thailand, but I'm seeing a steady improvement as repairs to the earthquake damage are repaired.

[Up2u]

I'm currently in Taipei enroute to LOS. I can access Thai websites with no problems, fast connection.

[Gaybutton]

As of 6:20 AM, in Thailand, now this board is loading much faster, almost at normal speed, but it is still slow going. But it is dramatically faster than just a few hours ago.

 

[Guest fountainhall]

Like Gaybutton I have just started to get gaythailand again in Bangkok today. Yahoo mail is accessible only occasionally but is dead slow. I have still not been able to get on to hotmail since Tuesday. But I am curious. A friend of mine also in Bangkok has had zero problem with his internet access all week. Does anyone know why this breakdown affects some servers but not all?

[Gaybutton]

Does anyone know why this breakdown affects some servers but not all?

 

At present, most of the web sites I access are running normally again, including the ones that are not working for you. From what I am being told, the problems were caused by damage to under-sea cables, most of which are fiber optics. I don't know much about how fiber optics work, but I do know enough to understand that whatever you're trying to access has to pass through the fiber optics. Your location determines which sets of fiber optics through which your access is routed. As soon as they have it repaired, then you should be able to access everything as normal. It's a question of time now. I have also been told it will take another day or two before everything is restored.

 

Now all we have to do is hope that a major after shock doesn't destroy the whole kit and caboodle again.

[Gaybutton]

The following appears in the BANGKOK POST:

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Quake Outage Shows Need for Backups

 

Taiwan tremor highlights the fragility of the telecoms network

 

By TANALEE SMITH AND PETER SVENSSON

 

Singapore -

 

A few seconds of undersea quaking was all it took to cause massive telecommunications disruptions throughout tech-savvy Asia, where internet services slowed or stopped, phone lines went dead and financial transactions ground to a halt. Analysts and industry insiders said the service disruption _ caused by the rupture of two undersea data transmission cables in Tuesday's earthquake in Taiwan _ is a sign of the vulnerability the world's telecommunications network, which was frenetically built out at the height of the internet boom, but has since attracted little investment.

 

However, activity is picking up, and the quake outage could open eyes to the need for more backup links.

 

''We are so accustomed to being connected at all points that it does shock people when suddenly it's no longer there,'' said telecommunications analyst Tim Dillon.

 

''Particularly in this region, which is tremendously connected in terms of mobile [phone], data and internet use.''

 

On Thursday, long-distance telephone connections were elusive and internet speeds remained slow _ and in some areas non-existent _ in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea. It is expected to take weeks to fully repair the links.

 

''I haven't experienced anything like this before,'' said Francis Lun, general manager at Fulbright Securities, one of many Hong Kong financial firms that were forced to conduct business by telephone on Wednesday.

 

''We've become too dependent on these optic fibres _ a few of them get damaged, and everything collapses. Many lost the opportunity to make fast money.''

 

Breaks in the undersea cables are not uncommon _ the culprits include earthquakes, volcanos, fishing trawlers, ship anchors and nibbling sharks. For this reason, fibre links are generally built as loops. For instance, FLAG Telecom's North Asia Loop runs undersea from Hong Kong to Taiwan to Korea to Japan, then takes another route back to Hong Kong.

 

If one link in the loop breaks, data will automatically be switched to flow the other way around the ring, and customers would ideally not even notice a change.

 

Outages occur when too many links break at the same time on too many rings. The sea bottom south of Taiwan, where the earthquake occurred, may have a dozen cables running in a relatively small area (though the exact location of the cables is usually not publicised by the owners, typically groups of telecommunications companies).

 

In a similar event, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake in Algeria in 2003 damaged cables in the Mediterranean, cutting links to France and slowing down internet access across the Middle East.

 

Part of the problem with this week's break may have been that a number of providers in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia may have rerouted US-bound traffic through Europe to avoid the cut south of Taiwan. But there is just a handful of cables leading west.

 

''The cable routes to Europe are overcrowded,'' said Mr Dillon, senior research director with US-based Current Analysis, which studies the telecom industry. Before the internet, satellites were a viable backup to land and sea links for international phone calls. But satellites can't carry the volume of internet traffic that fibre-optic cables enable. Using them is expensive, limiting them to ''mission critical'' purposes, said Duncan Clark of the Beijing-based consultancy BDA China.

 

That leaves Asia relying largely on high-speed cables running under the Pacific Ocean all the way to North America, still the technology and communications giant.

 

There are about 15 of these cables. Most of the high-capacity ones were installed in 2001, when companies raced to capitalise on what they thought was an imminent surge in demand for internet traffic.

 

But demand grew slower than expected, and the building boom ended badly for investors in companies like Global Crossing and MCI.

 

Now, internet traffic is starting to take a serious bite out of the immediately available capacity on the cables, though they can still be upgraded or ''lit'' by additional laser beams to carry more data.

 

But the Taiwan earthquake demonstrates that capacity is not everything: a big seismic event can affect many cables if they run close together.

 

Earlier this month, a consortium announced plans to lay a new US$500 million cable that should provide some more redundancy, enhancing a lower-speed system that serves as the lone direct link between the United States and China.

 

The consortium for the 11,000-mile (17,700-km) system includes New York-based Verizon Communications Inc, China Telecom, China Netcom, China Unicom and companies in South Korea and Taiwan. Construction is due to begin in the next three months and end in the third quarter of 2008.

 

''That cable will assist in providing additional restoration, additional redundant routes, because obviously it's a very active region in terms of seismic activity,'' Verizon spokesman Gil Broyles said. With the cable in place, Mr Broyles said, Verizon has the opportunity to go beyond the usual ''ring'' structure and configure a ''mesh architecture''. Instead of routing in one of two directions around a loop, meshed systems have more than two routes to each endpoint. Verizon earlier this month completed a mesh system under the Atlantic, the ocean with by far the greatest amount of data traffic.

 

''The undersea cable in the Atlantic is a little bit more of a mature infrastructure,'' Mr Broyles said. ''We basically combine six cable routes within one system so that customer traffic can survive even multiple cuts.''

 

That makes the Atlantic an unlikely place for a major outage, but it could still happen elsewhere.

 

Stephan Beckert, an analyst at Washington-based research firm TeleGeography, points out that there is just one high-speed cable loop, the Southern Cross, connecting Australia and New Zealand to the US. The two strands of the loop both run through Hawaii (though over different islands), a seismically active archipelago. AP

 

[bkkguy]

Does anyone know why this breakdown affects some servers but not all?

 

some local ISPs have multiple redundant links out of Thailand to many different locations in the USA, Asia and Europe, others are completely dependant on the links provided by CAT and are hence more affected

 

also different international connections connect to the major backbones in the USA at different points and have different routes to the servers you are trying to reach and may be more or less affected by the congestion caused by the recent problems thus gaythailand.com may be slow for true adsl users but not loxinfo users while the reverse may be true for sawatdee forum etc

 

bkkguy

 

 

[Gaybutton]

From where I'm sitting, nearly everything has returned to normal and normal speeds. I checked the various gay Thailand web sites and had no problems getting into any of them, with the exception of the Sawatdee forum. For the past few days, when I try to check that forum, I get the following:

 

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Not Found

The requested URL /favicon.ico was not found on this server.

 

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

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I don't know if others are getting that message, but that's what I'm seeing.

[Guest buaseng]

with the exception of the Sawatdee forum. For the past few days, when I try to check that forum, I get the following:

 

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Not Found

The requested URL /favicon.ico was not found on this server.

 

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

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I don't know if others are getting that message, but that's what I'm seeing.

 

I have had no problems getting into SGF even in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake using:

 

http://www.sawatdee-gay-thailand.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=9

 

(that is of course when accessing from the UK).

 

Incidentally the only forum website I have had any trouble with, following the earthquake damage, has been this one !!