Saturday, December 30, 2006
The earthquake at Tainan had shake up some wakening ideas about the internet. We have been taking Internet in our life for work and personal activities for granted in the recent years. With the internet we have been able to do instant messaging, online chatting, emailing and real time gaming etc from locally to global friends. All these come to crumble when the earthquake shook up the broadband cable linking the regions of SEA, taiwan, china and hongkong to international site.
In IT we often talked about backup plans and stuffs. With this incident we see that the ISP here rely heavily on this cable linking to the international site. Re-routing seems like non-existent, either that the company didnt want to pay for extra costs or wasn't part of the plan. Ironically internet was designed to survive the attack of nuclear bomb, and yet this earthquake with the power of 6-7 times of nuclear bomb crippled much of our online activities.
For almost 1.5 days I couldn't get on to my gmail. Took some bit of efforts for them to recover and re-route traffic elsewhere,but quality was still wasn't that good in the initial recovery period. Messages send on MSN Messenger was either bounced back or cannot logged on. IP Telephony was also hit badly, my budget call card to my Chinese friend quality wasn't that good till a day after. Everything was reducing back to the dialup modem days.
Today I think for SG end here, much of the condition got better. Being able to access this blog to write about this is a good sign. Hopefully this incident can serve as a lesson to all that things shouldn't be took for granted.
You're lucky to get access to gmail as the network is only partially recovered. they estimated that full recovery will take at least 7-10 days+ if it goes well.
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