Taiwan quake shakes confidence in undersea links
The earthquakes that hit Taiwan on Tuesday rocked communications in Asia and underscored the vulnerabilities of a system where huge amounts of data speed through the region in cables laid deep beneath the sea. Our traffic from Asia has dropped since the quake as it’s rumored that the internet is only at 40% capacity over there right now.
The cables, which for the most part lie unprotected on the ocean floor, can be damaged by ship anchors, fish nets that scrape the sea bottom and even in one case, sharks that gnawed on a line apparently due to its electromagnetic pulse, said policy think tank Rand Corporation (www.rand.org) in a recent report. The report predicted troubles in Taiwan could lead to major disruptions because it would be difficult to reroute data overland on the island. Experts said there should be few problems in the cable systems as long as there are backup routes and carriers can cooperate in times of crisis. Analysts said the disruption showed that most of the region’s cable networks run along earthquake-prone geographic zones.
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