International submarine cable operators are scrambling to repair key infrastructure damaged by last week's earthquake in Japan, while helping telecoms network carriers re-route traffic to avert major disruption to services.
'Roughly half of the trans-Pacific cable capacity is crippled right now,' Bill Barney (pictured), chief executive of Hong Kong-based submarine cable operator Pacnet, said yesterday. 'Some of the other cable systems are taking the load of the cables that are down.'
Hong Kong internet users experienced painfully slow network connections over the weekend and difficulties in connecting to websites in the city and in Japan.
Pacnet, which runs Asia's largest privately owned undersea cable network, and Pacific Crossing, a unit of NTT Communications, have both made public the damage caused by the earthquake in their respective cable systems. Other cable system operators have largely kept quiet.
'Basically, five cable systems cross the Pacific,' Barney said. 'I can't comment on the others, but our system, Unity, is operational. We do know that the other systems are either completely down or a portion of their systems are down.'
Launched in March last year, Unity is a trans-Pacific submarine cable system operated by a consortium led by Google, Pacnet, Singapore Telecommunications, KDDI, Bharti Airtel and Malaysian firm Global Transit.
Barney, however, said two segments of Pacnet's EAC-C2C cable system had showed 'severe degradation' on its routes to Asian markets.
