Taiwan quake shakes confidence in undersea links

SEOUL (Reuters) - The earthquakes that hit Taiwan on Tuesday rocked communications in Asia and underscored the vulnerabilities of a system where huge amounts of data speed through the region in cables laid deep beneath the sea.

Banks and brokerages from Seoul to Sydney were affected by the outage, with analysts saying that even though a single glitch can trigger global problems, there is little choice but to rely on this underwater network.

"Right now, there's no other network that can compete with submarine fiber-optic cables in terms of reliability," said Jin Chang-whan, an analyst at CJ Investment & Securities in Seoul.

The cables, which for the most part lie unprotected on the ocean floor, can be damaged by ship anchors, fish nets that scrape the sea bottom and even in one case, sharks that gnawed on a line apparently due to its electromagnetic pulse, said policy think tank Rand Corporation (www.rand.org) in a recent report.

The report predicted troubles in Taiwan could lead to major disruptions because it would be difficult to reroute data overland on the island.

Experts said there should be few problems in the cable systems as long as there are backup routes and carriers can cooperate in times of crisis.

Analysts said the disruption showed that most of the region's cable networks run along earthquake-prone geographic zones.

"People will start to say we can't let this happen again," said Frank Dzubeck, president of Washington D.C.-based telecoms consultancy Communications Networks Architects.

"The issue here is parallelism. You've really got to have multiple paths. You can't lay all the cables in the same place."

Dzubeck added that the Internet bust in 2001 had hit expensive plans by various companies to lay undersea cables along new paths that were less likely to be affected by earthquakes.

Earthquakes occur frequently around Taiwan and Japan, which lie on a seismically active stretch of the Pacific basin.

Undersea fiber-optic cables account for more than 95 percent of international telecommunications thanks to their strength, capacity and connection quality, according to South Korean provider KT Submarine Corp.