Channel
Impact of Taiwan Earthquake on Internet Access
The Taiwan earthquake which occured on 26 December last year was the
most extensive Internet service disruption ever experienced in Hong
Kong. According to Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA),
six out of seven major international submarine cables connecting Hong
Kong to US were affected. During the first two days, our access to most
international Internet sites was either very slow or impossible, while
access to local and mainland sites was not affected. It was heard that
the repairing of all these cables would take 6 to 8 weeks.
The Internet connection services of the eight local universites,
including HKUST, is primarily provided by Hutchison Global Crossing
(HGC). According to HGC, initially, they lost more than 60% of their
Internet capacity. However, they were able to redirect most of their
traffic via the remaining unbroken submarine cable which run an
indirect path by going via Singapore and Australia before reaching US.
Two days later, though it was still highly congested, our access to
international Internet sites were mostly resumed, except for some East
Asian regions like Taiwan, Japan and Korea.
ITSC has been actively monitoring the performance of our Internet
connection services. Our statistics shows that in late January, both
the speed and delay time of our international Internet access service
has returned to normal. The most updated status of the repairing of the
submarine cables can also be found at the OFTA web site: