Rush to recover from China's cut cable

China is rushing to recover from a fault in the $1.3 billion submarine cable

By Kristie Lu Stout
CNN.com Writer

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- China's information technology sector is scrambling to recover from the undersea U.S.-China cable cut that crippled Internet traffic throughout the area.

The severing of the submarine cable in the waters off Shanghai hit Internet traffic throughout Greater China on Friday.

The accident has shaken the region's bandwidth brokers, although dotcoms have reported little impact in page views.

Data centers, Internet service providers, and Chinese carriers -- starved for additional international capacity to meet increasing demand -- have emerged as the most affected entities.

A $1.3 billion lifeline

The U.S.-based ISP Uunet reported on Friday that regional Web sites would experience traffic loss due to a fault with the U.S.-China APCN/SE-WE3 cable.

Uunet estimates that it will take 23 days to get the cable line running again.

The $1.3 billion submarine cable is owned and operated by a private consortium of telcos including China Telecom, Korea Telecom, AT&T, MCI, KDDI and Global One.

"It's an 80 gigabyte line, with landing points in Chongming Island near Shanghai and Oregon, U.S.," says Duncan Clark of the Beijing-based telecom and Internet consultancy BDA.

The break in the inter-Pacific cable connection has not only affected Chinese customers trying to access worldwide contact, but also international surfers trying to access Chinese content.

"It's a network effect. When one part gets broken off, it's not just the country of China that gets affected. It's everyone," says IDC Internet analyst Matthew McGarvey.

The severed cable emergency is not a first for China, says Wei Chou Su, managing director for Greater China at Level 3, a wholesale bandwidth provider.

"The problem is with the Chinese landing site in Shanghai, it's a busy fishing area. It's been cut many times. This is not new," says Su.

Data centers, ISPs and Chinese carriers are rushing to companies like Level 3 to source additional capacity.

"There's a scramble. People want redundant capacity from us," says Su.

"People are asking us 'can you please give us 10 or 20 megs of capacity to shift right now' so their customers can have the connection."

No qualms for dotcoms

While telcos and info-tech companies are rushing to recover from the cable fault, China's homegrown dotcoms are for the most part immune to the inter-Pacific data transmission breakdown.

"China portals have servers that reside in the country, and are thus not affected by the cable cut," says Steve Yap of the Internet measurement firm Iamasia.

"From an operational standpoint, most of our page views come from China. We had minimal impact," says Sohu.com senior vice-president Joe Chen.

"We haven't felt it at all," says Yat Siu, founder and chief technology officer of the Hong Kong-based online community services provider Outblaze.

"A lot of the content is served locally. We don't require international traffic for our customer base," says Siu.

Greater China community site Renren.com reported no decrease in site speed, and no significant impact to the site's overall page views since 90 percent of its users come from within China.

"It hasn't affected us at all," says Renren.com senior vice-President of marketing Richard Robinson.

"It is affecting how local users are accessing Hotmail or their overseas stock accounts. Potentially, they will be surfing more localized sites instead."

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Cut cable cripples Web in China
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