Quake Reminds Asia They Need More Tubes

Miscellaneous

from the capacity-strapped dept

With the serious disruption in fiber connectivity caused by the quakes in Asia this week, there’s again the collective realization that yes, technology — and in particular Internet connectivity — can be fragile. Outages from the magnitude 6.7 quake off Taiwan’s coast briefly rattled financial markets and communications in multiple countries. Though impacted markets saw positive trading for the day, the resulting mess renewed interest in the vulnerability of a global economy, leading to renewed calls for investment in Asia Pac fiber. While the U.S. remains the world’s biggest traffic hub, managing 1.4 Tbps worth of bandwidth, Asia Pac connectivity was already ramping up. Many existing routes are now capacity strapped, lack redundancy, and not everyone can cram their traffic over the 320 GB/s Atlantic pipes connecting New York and London. Demand is driving a number of new links; a recent deal between India’s Reliance Infocomm and China Telecom finally letting the two countries exchange data without using the U.S. as a hub. Verizon Business and a number of Asian companies also recently announced a new 11,000 mile, $500 million trans-pacific cable (1.28 terabits/second at first, 5 terabits later) that will stretch from Oregon to China, making stops in Tanshui, Taiwan, and Keoje, South Korea. As Senator Ted Stevens might say, Asia simply needs more tubes — something companies were already working on before the earth began to shake.