Taiwan quake shakes confidence in undersea links

One alternative would be satellites, which are costlier and do not provide as much capacity or quality of transmission as fiber-optic cables, analysts said.

Just last week, Verizon Communications Inc. and five Asian companies agreed to invest $500 million to build a new cable network to directly link China and the United States.

BETTER THAN PIGEONS

Submarine cables have been around for about 150 years, with the some of the first lines being a well-insulated copper wire running under the English Channel. One alternative used at the time to transmit data was the carrier pigeon.

Now the cables hold a mass of tightly packed, flexible glass lines that can handle millions of telephone calls, which means that any damage can lead to major disruptions.

A country such as South Korea, the world's 11th largest economy, has 10 main undersea cables connecting it to the world, said KT Corp., the country's top fixed-line and broadband service provider. Seven of them were damaged by the quake.

India was highly vulnerable from damage to undersea cable links because it receives 80 percent to 90 percent of its bandwidth from the undersea network, industry officials said.

And neighboring Pakistan's sole undersea fiber-optic cable link with the outside world developed a serious fault in June 2005, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, for 11 days.

"Internet service providers should think like bus companies," said Mohamed Shahril Tarmizi, executive director at Malaysian technology consulting company BinaFikir.

"Instead of using just one route to get to a destination, it's more useful to have many routes."

(With additional reporting by Sumeet Chatterjee in Bangalore, Niluksi Koswanage in Kuala Lumpor, Baker Li in Taipei, Sachi Izumi in Tokyo and Yinka Adegoke in New York)