Big Quake Cuts Communications in Taiwan

Taiwanese rescuers clear rubble from a collapsed building after a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck, Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2006, in Pingtung County, 350 kilometers (217 miles) south west of Taipei, Taiwan. Taiwan's telephone communications with neighboring Asian countries were cut off Wednesday, hours after a powerful earthquake struck the southern part of the island, killing two and triggering a regional tsunami alert. The quake, which hit late Tuesday, came on the second anniversary of the devastating tsunami that took more than 200,000 lives in southern Asia. (AP Photo/David Lee) (David Lee - AP)

"Of the seven major submarine optical fiber cable systems serving Hong Kong, all of them have been affected," said Au Man-ho of the Telecommunications Authority.

"Six of them have been completely damaged and there is a remaining one with a limited capacity," Au told reporters.

Au added that roaming and long-distance phone service to all destinations except Taiwan were normal again.

The Internet Traffic Report Web site, which monitors Internet connectivity in several countries, showed that packet loss, or the percentage of data that doesn't reach its destination, spiked sharply in Asia at the time of the earthquake, rising from about 10 percent to more than 40 percent.

On Wednesday afternoon U.S. time, the Web site showed limited connectivity to China, Singapore and Indonesia, while Japan and Taiwan were apparently back to normal.

KDDI Corp., Japan's major carrier for international calls, said its fixed-line telephone service was affected by the quake. Company spokesman Haruhiko Maeda said customers were having trouble calling India and the Middle East, which usually use the cables near Taiwan. Maeda said the company was rerouting calls through the U.S. and Europe.

South Korea's largest telecom company, KT, said that the lines it uses were damaged, affecting dozens of companies and institutions, including South Korea's Foreign Ministry.

In the U.S., Cisco Systems Inc.'s Linksys unit warned that customer support call centers for its home networking gear were affected by the outage, but other companies with overseas call centers reported few problems.

Molly Faust, a spokeswoman for American Express Co., the global travel and payment card company headquartered in New York, said the company "wasn't experiencing any customer service issues in Asia."

She said that there were "some interruptions" of the company's computer systems in Taiwan, but added: "It didn't impact customers because we could use backup systems and manual processes."

Tyco International Ltd. said it has a Taiwan-based cable-laying ship heading to the area for repairs.

"Pretty much everything south of Taiwan has been reported at fault," said Frank Cuccio, vice president of marine services at Morristown, N.J.-based Tyco Telecommunications.

Cuccio expects the ship to be in position in a few days. It then takes three to five days to repair each cable, but mudslides set off by the earthquake can complicate matters by covering the cables, making them harder to retrieve from the bottom.

Cuccio said the ruptures are more than 10,800 feet below sea level, too deep for the remote-controlled submersibles that otherwise would find the cables. Instead, the ship will drag grapnels along the bottom to find them.

The cables on the deep ocean floor are just two-thirds of an inch, a testament both to the immense data capacity of optical fiber and the fragility of the links that form the global telecommunications network.

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Svensson reported from New York. AP Business Writer Eileen Alt Powell also contributed to this report.