appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

isVideo

articlePageQuery

article

articleSchemaContent

content

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

appConfig

filter

json

liveArticle

Netvigator broadband customers throughout Hong Kong were hit by a two-hour failure yesterday, with customers of the SAR's largest Internet service provider trying to log on between 2pm and 4pm receiving a 'no response from server' message.

The disruption hit both home and business users and areas affected included Fanling, Pokfulam, Admiralty and Quarry Bay.

Pacific Century CyberWorks, which operates Netvigator, did not return calls seeking comment but a network traffic monitor at the Hong Kong Internet Exchange's Web site showed data volume was about a third lower than its normal level during the outage.

Users who called the Netvigator customer service line said they were greeted with busy signals or a message saying there were network difficulties and the company was striving to fix the problem.

One network manager at Pacific Coffee, which provides Netvigator Internet services to customers, said the chain's services had been disrupted.

Customers of other Hong Kong broadband services, many of whom rely on CyberWorks for wholesale bandwidth, seem not to have been affected.

Netvigator last month had more than 340,000 broadband subscribers, about half of Hong Kong's total.

Some users complained the network downtime affected their ability to work. The number of protests received by the South China Morning Post from Netvigator users indicates Hong Kong's reliance on Netvigator as well as increased use of broadband.

The Office of the Telecommunications Authority (Ofta) said there were more than 673,000 broadband accounts in Hong Kong at the end of February, with more than 48,000 of them business lines.

Ofta's data indicates a move to broadband and away from dial-up access over the past year. Broadband subscribers consumed 12.7 terabits of data in March, compared with 3.7 terabits in March last year. Minutes consumed by dial-up Internet customers, meanwhile, have fallen about half over the past year. Dial-up users spent about 7,950 hours online in February, from 16,533 hours in the same month last year.

The trend is likely to continue as Hong Kong's network operators show no signs of ending their discounts for new broadband subscribers who sign up for long-term contracts.

Aside from digital subscriber line access over fixed telephone circuits offered by CyberWorks and rivals such as Sony's So-net, CCT Telecom's HKNet, City Telecom (HK) and Hutchison Whampoa, Hong Kong users also have the option of using cable for Internet access. I-Cable, Hong Kong's only broadband cable operator, had 160,000 subscribers as of the end of last year.



Netvigator customers in dark