26th Dec 06 Taiwan Earthquake Knocks Out Internet For Whole Shenzhen
The earthquake off the coast of southern Taiwan on 26th December 2006 was felt as up to force 4 tremors in Shenzhen. Local people rushed outside, made up pointlessly panicky stories for the press, or else just wondered why they were feeling so drunk and dizzy so early in the evening.
The bad news was that the earthquake damaged undersea cables linking China to Taiwan, meaning now for 4 days Shenzhen’s internet connection to the outside world has been fucked.
Details:
- China Telecom for some reason ONLY has these undersea cables and NO contingency / backup / redundancy / vestige of competence and according to the press are vaguely “considering” [catching up with the 21st Century and] “installing satellite data links”.
- China Telecom ADSL links have basically had zero connection to servers outside China. Obviously sites hosted inside China are all working fine, so that’s why it’s foreigners in China bitching about this outage and not many Chinese people really minding apart from not being able to chat online on MSN in the office all day.
- Topway cable DSL was stable and connecting OK for the first two days but is now pretty shafted and connection is hit and miss. (Even more hit and miss than normal.)
- Connection through proxies in Hong Kong is currently the best shot at contact with the outside world.
- Phone call quality is also crappy to foreign countries because of the outage.
- The newspapers are basically not giving much information apart from that the situation is not set to return to “normal” for “several days”, which is China could mean weeks.
Obligatory conspiracy theories occurring to expats:
“This is just an excuse by China Telecom to save money by not paying for bandwidth for a few days”.
OR
“The earthquake is just an excuse while whole new Great Firewall Of China blocking system is installed and rolled out.”
Apologies for the negative tone of the blog post… Hey, at least [after letting the browser load this page for an hour] I can post at all!
UPDATE:
Click here to read the news as summarised on the media blog Danwei.
http://www.danwei.org/internet/quake_damage_to_undersea_cable.php…which confirms:
“China Telecommunications Group, the country’s biggest fixed-line telephone operator and parent of China Telecom Corp, said Internet had been badly disrupted.”& From The Comments:
“”some foreign websites in China are still not loading properly” …some?? In Nanjing using VNet ADSL, all foreign websites haven’t been loading since the quake. There have been sporadic moments of accessibility at molasses in winter-like speed; otherwise, all queries return the Nanny-like “Cannot find server”.”
Exactly.
January 1st, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Here is the news as summarised on the media blog Danwei:
http://www.danwei.org/internet/quake_damage_to_undersea_cable.php
…which confirms:
“China Telecommunications Group, the country’s biggest fixed-line telephone operator and parent of China Telecom Corp, said Internet had been badly disrupted.”
in case anyone hadn’t noticed.
From Their Comments:
“”some foreign websites in China are still not loading properly” …some?? In Nanjing using VNet ADSL, all foreign websites haven’t been loading since the quake. There have been sporadic moments of accessibility at molasses in winter-like speed; otherwise, all queries return the Nanny-like “Cannot find server”.”
Exactly.