chaos on the Philippine Internet

December 27, 2006

 I pulled this off the marketwatch site, filed at 3 pm Dec 28 Manila time. At around noon today, one of our major Telco providers (Bayantel) seems to have gone down.  The initial report was that an underwater cable to the Philippines had gone out. The report below, however, seems to indicate that it is the link between Taiwan and HK that has gone down, and not an RP-Taiwan or RP-HK  link. This outage has caused HK providers to reroute their connections through other links, primarily US-HK links. As a result HK-US routes are heavily congested. In the same manner, RP Telcos are now probably rerouting their traffic to not go via HK (or Taiwan) but through RP-US links (perhaps routed through Singapore?).

 

As of this writing, only our ETPI connection seems to be OK. Bayantel service seems to be intermittent (from our servers in the US, we have intermittent access to our Bayantel servers). Surfing through our Globe DSL 1Mbps link is impossible (bizarre - given the Globe SingNET connection); Attempts to connect to servers on the PLDT network have failed, indicating that PLDT connections are down as well.  So that's really interesting… ETPI is the only provider with a solid connection at this point. Erwin Oliva at INQ7 reports that Digitel is out as well.

 

We've written some code to monitor all the 4 major Telcos: PLDT, ETPI, Globe, and Bayantel through this crisis and I'll try to report on the results from time to time. 

 

Taiwan quakes kill 2, disrupt phone/Internet communications

2:09 AM EST December 27, 2006

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — A series of powerful earthquakes off Taiwan's southern coast killed at least two people and injured 42, damaged undersea communications cables, and crippled Internet and mobile communications on Wednesday to parts of China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and the U.S., according to reports.

Bloomberg News reported the casualties, citing the Taiwan National Fire Agency.

Repairing the cable could take as long as three weeks, but service should improve gradually each day, the Associated Press reported, citing a spokesman from Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan's largest phone company.

Taiwan was hit by four earthquakes Tuesday, according to Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau.

The first, which was a magnitude of 6.7 on the Richter scale, struck at 8:26 p.m. local time Tuesday and was centered off Taiwan's south coast. Three more earthquakes ranging between magnitude 5.2 and 6.4 occurred between 8:34 p.m. and 11:41 p.m. All four earthquakes were centered in the same region according to reports.

A fifth quake of magnitude 5.9 occurred at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday and was centered 53 kilometers (33 miles) south of Kaohsiung City.

The quakes interrupted 98% of Taiwan's communications with Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong, according to the AP.

The service disruption also hampered Internet service in Hong Kong, making it difficult to download from some sites in the U.S. and Asia.