A Month Later, China’s Net Still Crawling
Friday marks the one-month anniversary of the Boxing Day earthquake in Taiwan that damaged 6 underwater telecom cables and crippled internet access all over Asia. While some progress has been made in the restoration of Asia’s internet connection, mainland China’s internet has not been restored as promised. Connections to some U.S. sites are still terribly slow, streaming is nearly impossible and as for downloading video, as they say in New York– forget about it.
A day after the earthquake, Beijing promised a speedy recovery assuring China’s web users that everything would be back to normal by January 15th. On January 16th, three weeks after the quake, the China Daily reported that not a single cable had been repaired. The government blamed bad weather and “intricate undersea conditions” for the delay. Intricate undersea conditions? I’d be surprised if the conditions 4,000 meters below sea level were anymore “intricate” than they have been for the last million or so years. With, of course, the exception of some broken fiber-optic cables.
On January 16th, an expert with the repair company Global Marine told the Shanghai Daily that the depth of the cables precluded the application of electrical technology or underwater robots. He said that workers were using “technologies of the 19th century to solve problems of the 21st century.” Reportedly, the men fixing the cables are using grappling hooks at the end of long ropes to drag the seabed for the damaged cables. Again in mid-January, the government said two more weeks.
Though the cables have not been fixed, within the last three weeks, a fair amount of internet traffic has been restored through “alternative channels.” For the most part, the problems that still exist are a slowing of connection speed and an inability to reach certain foreign sites from inside China. The reason for the slowing, according to the January 29 issue of Newsweek, is that the disabled cables have forced data to take alternative routes to reach their desired destination. For instance, an email from Taipei to Shanghai would be rerouted through the United States. Newsweek also reports that the repair job won’t be completed until mid-February.
Imagethief, a popular Beijing-based English blog said of the internet problems, “International websites are still accessible from China, much in the same way that a magazine at the other end of a football field is technically readable if you have binoculars. You can do it with some patience, but it’s a drag turning the page.” The Imagethief blogger informed readers a week ago that the Taiwan earthquake had made the site’s “administration tools very hard to reach.”
Besides the blogosphere, Chinese businesses, especially e-trading companies have been hit especially hard by the internet slowing. A CCTV International survey found that 70% of China’s small businesses claimed to be negatively impacted by the web problems. A People’s Daily article earlier this month reported that Dell China’s online sales were crippled by the earthquake and that MSN, China’s preferred chat tool, was disabled for days. QQ, China’s local chat program which was unaffected by the damaged cables, gained 40,000 new subscribers the day after the earthquake. And worst of all, 10,000 Chinese web businesses lost their domain names as a result of the earthquake.
Strangely, as the writer of CNET’s Little Red Blog points out, the internet problems in China vary based on time and location. While Google’s search engine and email service have worked perfectly for me in Shanghai throughout Asia’s entire web debacle, the writer on CNET’s blog claimed a few days back, “Gmail has been almost useless, and only functions in its simplified HTML format.”
A month after the Taiwan earthquake, internet users in China realize how fragile the web’s infrastructure really is. The way we use the internet nowadays– streaming video, internet telephone calls and multiplayer video gaming– is not what the internet was originally designed for. And as the Chinese divers try to grasp these advanced fiber-optic cables with metal hooks and ropes, it should now be painfully obvious to all, that the technology we create that relies on internet cables does not match the technology of the actual cables.
•Newsweek: The Internet Trembles