ASIA PACIFIC CABLE OPERATORS seem to have learned their lessons from the now infamous 2006 Boxing Day Taiwan earthquake, which impacted all but one of the region’s subsea cables and left its communications network at a standstill. Despite confirmed cuts on all of the region’s systems – again – over the past week, including APCN2, APCN, EAC, C2C, FNAL/RNAL and SMW3, traffic continued to flow, albeit slower than usual..

And while engineers at many of the major operators still had to rush to reroute customers to diverse paths, or onto the only cable that wasn’t impacted—Tata Communications’ TGN-Intra Asia—the overall network was more or less operational. “We have capacity on APCN2. We also have capacity on EAC and FNAL and C2C, and we saw outages on all of those,” Simon Cooper, vice president for Network Strategy, Architecture & Optimisation at Tata Communications, told CommsDay.

“But we are very happy to be able to say that the TGN-IA Asia, which was introduced in February and we also brought Hong Kong online a couple of weeks ago, remained completely unimpacted. What we were able to do was to take a lot of the capacity that we have in inventory that was planned for the year ahead, and make use of those to make sure that none of our services were not impacted and also to assist some of the customers and partners with some rapid turn up of additional bandwidth for them, both across Asia and also from Asia to the USA.”

TGN REROUTES: According to Cooper, some 30-40 Gbps of traffic was rerouted onto TGN-IA by Tata with a similar amount turned up for its customers and partners. That extra capacity and the use of new routes via Europe to the US have helped cushioned any impact from the latest series of cuts. By Thursday, all of Tata’s customers were up and running, with “no major issues outstanding.”

Verizon Business spokesperson Linda Laughlin also confirmed its engineers were able to move a significant amount of traffic from the impacted systems to the operator’s wavelength-based mesh network, which extends from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, to Japan, and across the Pacific to the US.

Even at Pacnet, which owns both EAC and C2C impacted systems, CTO Wilfred Kwan says that all protected services on its network – meaning customers who have subscribed to protected services – have been restored.

“I think maybe there was some learning from 2006 and some relationships that have been built and two or three more years of foundation since then, and so the customers that needed us gave us a call and we knew what we are doing obviously,” Tata’s Cooper said. “I’m hearing that most of the telcos in Hong Kong
and Singapore are more or less back in some shape and form – so I would say that there was an improved reaction based on changes in processes, planning and escalations and so on.”

Cooper explained that in addition to the extra capacity on the TGN-IA system, the availability of the more flexible model of unprotected bandwidth from systems such as APCN2 actually helped in the restoration process. “APCN2 is now offering to its owners unprotected services on the wavelength level, so some of that is being used by carriers, whereas previously, they were taking protected services and if something went down, they didn’t have so much control on what they could do,” he said.

“The other thing in Singapore that has helped is carriers taking advantage of the route towards Europe and the East Coast of the US. Some of them have propped up the capacity on that side in anticipation of something like this. I suspect that some applications might still be suffering, but the bulk of the typical Internet, email and so on, is fairly stable.”

QUEUE FOR SHIPS: While the traffic has been rerouted, the repair work on the actual cables will likely take weeks due to the vast number of impacted systems.

“You can’t keep a stock of ships ready for a once in ten year event like this, where there are seven or eight repairs at the same time, so there will be a queue. I’m sure there’s a lot of coordination going on to prioritise which repair, where the cable ships will go and in what order,” Cooper said. “I would suspect that similar to last time, there will be six or seven weeks of work to be done and especially if it is an earthquake and landslide that makes the repair that much more difficult because kilometers and kilometers of cable can be buried, which makes
it harder to recover and so on.”

While no official explanation of the cable breaks have been issued, underwa- ter landslides caused by one of the region’s most severe storms in recent times—Typhoon Morakat—is the likely cause.

“We surely don’t know all the details yet, but the Taiwan cable breaks are not at all mysterious and the industry knows what caused them. Cause of the breaks was submarine mass movements otherwise known as turbidity currents,” said Steve Bershader, a telecoms engineer at General Dynamics-AIS.

“Resulting from the severe weather and the earthquakes, a wave of sediment traveled down the Penghu Canyon / Manila Trench off southwest Taiwan. This was the same location as the Boxing Day 2006 cable breaks. My oceanographer informs me that once a submarine slide begins, it can travels hundreds of km down the submarine canyons, and can take days to settle. We should probably expect that, when all the facts are known, we will discover that the cables broke sequentially, over a period of time, starting near Taiwan and moving outward.”

However, not every one is convinced that the cable breaks can be blamed on the weather.

NEXUS POINTS: Bob Fonow, managing director of RGI Ltd and a former US State Department advisor on telecommunications in Iraq, says that the strategic locations of the breaks – located in what he calls the “nexus points in the international telecommunications system” – highlights the vulnerability of the global infrastructure and point to less natural causes.

“It’s been known for about three years that the system can be sectored by manipulating cables and the network of hubs that provide the interconnections points. For some time there has been a sense that the system is being tested for such a development, perhaps as part of national cyber war and cyber security re- gimes. There are a limited number of countries with the capacity to do this without totally disrupting the system, but the tests themselves may explain some of the outages. It is conceivable that non-state or international terror groups would also find this capability interesting,” he said, drawing parallels between the latest cable breaks and the outages that impacted the Middle East last year.

STILL UNEXPLAINED: “The Middle East outages have not been explained, at least to my satisfaction. I studied the issues pretty closely prior to the event, and forecasted something like those outages in a classified report,” he said.

“If this is a series of tests it’s not necessary to compare them with the Middle East because the idea will be to isolate areas of the network, for example, as a last resort to contain a cyber attack, or initiate one. So the Middle East is just one ‘future battle space.’ China, India, the US, Europe, Iran, Israel, Korea, Japan, etc. can be combined in any number of permutations.”

He warns that while the Asian outages might turn out to be nothing unusual, these multi-cable outages give the world the impression that the telecommunications network is quite fragile in some ways, and could be manipulated in a way to serve a variety of political and economic ends.

“One hears, for example, that when this happens, telecommunications becomes the subject of discussions in jihadist websites,” he pointed out. “So one assumes that a highly technical defense establishment is trying to discover and set boundaries for how to respond or initiate attacks. This shouldn’t be seen as just an issue of software applications. This is beyond the ‘imaginative novel’ stage now.”