Thursday, August 13, 2009

APCN2 cable cut cripples connections

By Victoria Ho, ZDNet Asia
Wednesday, August 12, 2009 04:50 PM
A cut in the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) undersea submarine cable crippled connection speeds for users in the Asia-Pacific region on Wednesday, particularly in Singapore and the Philippines.
Users were sending updates to local forums and Twitter, complaining of slow connection speeds to sites hosted outside of the region.
According to a notice sent by Malaysian telco, TM Net, the cable fault was traced to segment 7 of the APCN2, which stretches between Shantou, China and Tanshui, Taiwan. TM Net traced the outage to Typhoon Morakot, which hit the region over the weekend.
Additionally, segment 1 of the APCN2 is also currently under repair. Repairs on segment 7 are expected to commence after work on segment 1 is completed.
Internet connection speeds are expected to return to normal late evening Aug. 13, according to the advisory.
Singapore operator, SingTel, confirmed the cable fault in an e-mail to ZDNet Asia, saying that customers can expect to face high latency as a result. It added that its STIX (SingTel Internet Exchange) Internet backbone provider is working on rectifying the issue.
A status update posted on InternetTrafficReport.com showed SingTel's Singapore gateway registered a score of only 34 points, compared to the global average "health" of network connections, which was 86 points as at 3pm Singapore time on Wednesday.
The site first started registering increased response time and packet loss in Singapore at 8pm Tuesday evening.
Back in 2006, the APCN2 was taken out by a powerful earthquake in Taiwan. Internet access was reportedly badly disrupted and halted in some parts of Asia after the quake.


Source: is kudos to ZDNET for being able to dig this up from singtel.
http://forums.vr-zone.com/chit-chatting/469255-singnet-slow-today-2.html