China's cut cable fixed

China has recovered from a fault in a $1.3 billion undersea cable

By Kristie Lu Stout
CNN.com Writer

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- The U.S.-China submarine cable break that crippled Inernet traffic in much of China has been repaired.

China's official news agency, Xinhua, reported that the $1.3 billion undersea cable was fixed on Monday, more than a week after it was severed.

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

The severing of the submarine cable in the waters off Shanghai hit Internet traffic throughout Greater China on February 9.

China was forced to divert much Internet traffic onto satellites, slowing connections considerably and making many North American sites inaccessible, after the cable linking China to the US west coast suffered the break.

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

A $1.3 billion lifeline

The U.S.-based ISP Uunet originally reported that it would take 23 days to get the cable line running again.

The 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 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 was 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.

During the cable break, data centers, ISPs and Chinese carriers rushed 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

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

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

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.

Xinhua did not report what had caused the break.

Sci-Tech
Cut cable cripples Web in China
February 9, 2001
Surfers wait amid rush to fix cable
February 12, 2001
22.5 million Net users in China
February 19, 2001

Sohu
Renren.com
Level 3
China Telecom

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