The December 26 7.1-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Taiwan appears to have demonstrated both the vulnerabilities and resiliency of the international telecommunications network. The quake damaged six of the seven undersea fiber optic cables that linked Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America. Damaged cables include the Asia Pacific Cable Network and the South East Asia ? Middle East ? Western Europe cable (source). The damaged cables carry 90 percent of the region?s telecommunications traffic (source).

Impact of Quake

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Asia?s telecommunication infrastructure was negatively impacted. Taiwan?s Chunghwa Telecom Company, the country?s largest operator, said that only 40 percent of the country?s international calling capacity to the US was available. Further, capacity to Japan and China was only 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively. According to the Internet Traffic Report, the damage cables caused a 30 percent spike in packet loss, which measures the amount of Internet traffic that does not reach its destination, across Asia.

Limited Disruptions

While these disruptions are serious, there appears to be no lasting effect from the damage to the undersea cables and the telecommunications infrastructure. While it will take up to three weeks to repair the damaged cables, traffic was re-routed to other cables and satellite links. As a result, within two days of the earthquake, regional and international telecommunications carriers signaled that voice traffic was almost back to normal. Additionally, Internet users in most of the region were also able to regain access to basic Internet services like e-mail messages (source).

Good Timing and Redundancy

The limited disruption of the cable breaks appears to be due to in large part to two factors. First, the timing of the earthquake?during the holiday season–limited the impact of the telecommunications disruptions because many businesses were closed. Second, the redundancy of the international telecommunications network, enabled by the excess capacity of fiber and other transmission lines, helped limit the disruption caused by the breaks in the undersea cables. According to John Ure, director of the Telecommunication Research Project at the University of Hong Kong, ?there is a lot of redundancy in the system.? Ure believes that even with 30 percent to 50 percent growth rates in Asia?s Internet usage, there will still be excess capacity in telecommunications system for several years. This spare capacity allowed Asia?s regional telecommunications operators to re-route traffic across other available cables and satellite links.

Future Disruptions

While this disruption appears to have had a limited impacted on Asia?s telecommunications service, a future disruption may result in a more lasting negative impact. For example, should telecommunications cease to continue investment in spare capacity, regional operators may not be able to re-route traffic as quickly in the future. Should telecommunications operators fail to continue building spare capacity into the system, a future disruption may result in serious consequences and long-term outages.