The broken fiber optic cables connecting Asia and the Americas has some interesting effects. I have read various reports (all from Asian news servers, since Western sources are all offline for us) about different Southeast Asian, Central Asian, and East Asian countries making it back online since the earthquakes, and that may well be true for some, but things are a little different out here in the less-connected parts of China.
The China Daily article states that Chinese connections are back up to 15%. Sources from India, Singapore, and others have said their connections are almost back up to normal. That is great for them! But here, American servers are basically non-existant and European servers are slow, but accessible.
The best thing we have had since this all happened has been Google and their services. The search engine stayed up, even immediately after the earthquake. And with New Frontier China's e-mail and web servers in America, Google's Gmail was the only thing that has kept us in connection with the outside world. This weblog entry was brought to you only through sending it through Gmail to a friend who could enter the information on the weblog.
If the rest of Asia is online and can redirect internet traffic, I have to wonder what is happening in China. If the earthquake disrupted most of Asia, that means their lines were running through China already. And if they are getting back online and China seems to be lagging, that can only mean that they have some alternate routes and that China lacks significant alternate routes.
Anyway, I find this all very interesting for other reasons. I am a licensed amateur radio operator, and in the United States, the radio operators are the folks that are there for emergency communications when the existing networks are strained or completely knocked out by hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, blizzards, and whatever else. We even take care of public events that cannot be sustained on normal communication networks.
Sure, we all forget (or never knew) the technologies behind our everyday devices. This earthquake has clearly reminded us that the internet is not just an invisible network, invincible to damage. It is almost completely dependent on physical, not wireless or satellite, connections. One article writing on the loss of internet coverage commented, "I guess we are back to using cell phones," but that is probably an even more misunderstood technology. Sure, our mobile phones are wireless, but the networks are very much "wired" and based on land lines. If those are broken, for whatever reason, our wonderful wireless toys are no better than paper weights.
Actually, the day before the earthquake, our internet and phone service went down (not the whole town, just our particular provider). I never did find out why. I stopped asking why the power and phone go out from time to time; I found out I can better use my time in other ways. So, the next morning, when I woke up, and the internet was slow but moving, I thought it was just the same problem slightly fixed. It took a while to find out we had moved into the next problem, one none of us expected: Asia was out of service!
We will never be immune to these kinds of setbacks, regardless of our technological innovation. I have decided for us here in our little town, it is an excellent time, having been freed from the daily toil of keeping up with e-mail, to focus on some of those long undone to-do items which do not need the internet.
I will have to comment that the day this entry was posted, we started to gain some connection to web servers in the Americas again. I still would not call it 15%. We get through to the American continent late afternoon only, and the connection is very slow.
My Gmail account seems to run on exactly the opposite schedule, fast in the mornings and slow to nothing in the late afternoon. I am guessing, the Chinese servers are not busy in the morning, thus helping Google speed up. Then, when the Chinese servers are working overtime in the afternoon, Gmail is hard to use. However, the American continent (and Europe, through which the traffic is probably routed) is fast asleep in China's late afternoon, and I can use the servers even with a weak connection.
I am thankful for a little movement, especially to receive and send e-mail through my primary servers. Still, I will be elated when those cables are fixed and back to normal.
Posted by: Cooper Strange | 2 Jan 2007 at 17:46