Optical fibers are the bedrock of modern communications. Since its invention in the 1970’s over 300 million kilometers of optical fiber have been produced. One fiber has the ability to carry 60 millions simultaneous telephone calls. These amazing properties are being called to service everyday in our global information network. So when a 7.1 Richter scale earthquake shook the sea bed off the coast of Taiwan where several large cable bundles passed through, nearly all of Asia was put under a telecommunications blackout of some magnitude or other.

The quake damaged both cables that connected Asia to itself and cables that spanned the Pacific to America. The breaks brought local internet capacity to less than 60% while cutting off American sites entirely. On an Asia based forum (Aliababa.com), a user asked:

“How Did the Earthquake Near Taiwan affect your business in Sourcing from China?”

And received responses like:

“….we could not open, MSN, Yahoo and other international websites…All the messangers [sic] stopped for the first day. Yahoo take 3 days to restart and MSN also two days…”

And,

“i canot [sic] enter into website abroad :’(   :’(   :’(”

I personally had two friends who were in China at the time of the quake, both of whom recounted to me the agony with which they endured life without AIM, Email, and Facebook.

“The communications cables are not divided up per country, so no country will find its situation improving sooner or later than the others,” said.Ku A-Jong, a spokesman for KT, the largest South Korean mobile service provider.

Fiber links are built in loops. A link from Taiwan to Singapore to Hong Kong would circle back to Taiwan. If one link breaks, data will immediate being flowing in the other direction. The Chinese state news reported that China’s largest telecom company China Telecom Corp. was asking other telecom companies in Europe and the U.S. to borrow bandwidth through satellites (iht.com).

We remember from class that these links are built in loops just as the first internet connections were built in the 60’s between MIT, Harvard, Stanford etc. When one link broke servers tried to reroute data through the other lines for data within the network and trying to reroute data from America through Europe.. Also, the trans-Pacific cables can be considered analogous to weak ties among friends. They are the conduits by which information from a far away place get to where you are. There aren’t many of them and one of them is broken, there will be a loss of large amounts of information. Normally, the weak links in a social network are not called into service frequently, yet with the internet they are in constant use, thus all of East Asia has to suffer from not being able to get on MSN.