Taiwan Quake, Misc. News

God but I've got a full plate and it's exhausting. Business at Jungle has been great -- really, best it's ever been in the two years I've had the place - but we're still two staff short and it's a strain on them on me, and of course a pain for the customers when things get really hopping. Please, if you know good English speaking staff we need staff for both day and night shifts. Lot of new bars in town scooping up staff, so it's become much harder to fill vacancies than it used to be.

I've re-ordered the Cash-Cobain t-shirt, and we should have them back in stock in a couple days. If you're in the states and want me to bring you one, let me know. If outside Cambodia I can ship them at not too great an expense so please feel free to ask about that too.

I'm just about to enter escrow selling my house in California. A great thing. I can't imagine it will really all get wrapped up by February 1 which is the plan, particularly with an uncooperative tenant, but I'm trying and disposing of it will be a great relief.

Vatey's not been well and I'm trying to do my best by her, and feel I'm falling short in that regard, particuarly now with all the stuff in California going on and the Jungle being so very busy. The 6:45am - 6pm construction noise next door to our apartment is actually getting worse -- I didn't think that possible -- so our lovely riverfront apartment isn't seeming so lovely a respite these days. If you see me asleep at the Jungle you'll understand why. As a bar owner I feel obliged to drink with my customers through the evening -- it is my business -- but I"m gonna start taking a few nights off here and there. The late hours and early wake-ups are wearing heavily.

The American Embassy here is taking over immigration interviews as of February 1, so our cook Srey will be looking at a post February 1 date here in Phnom Penh rather than sooner in Bangkok. I'm sure the interview will go well when she gets there and we're all going to miss her terribly when she does leave for the states. We'll need another cook for back up when she leaves too.

The internet disruption that hit Asia yesterday has had little impact here at Jungle -- a few sites have been unreachable but we're basically up and running. Here's the story on that from the AP

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- With one blow, Mother Nature triggered the largest telecommunications outage in years, cutting off or slowing telephone and Internet traffic in Asia from Beijing to Bangkok.

A powerful earthquake off the southern tip of Taiwan late Tuesday damaged up to a dozen fiber-optic cables that cross the ocean floor south of Taiwan. They usually carry traffic between China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the U.S. and the island itself.

The magnitude-6.7 tremor, which struck near the town of Hengchun, killed two residents of Taiwan and injured more than 40 people.

It also showed the vulnerability of the global telecommunications network.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan's largest phone company, said the quake damaged several of the undersea fiber lines, and repairs could take two to three weeks.

Taiwan lost almost all of its telephone capacity to Japan and mainland China. Service to the United States also was hard hit, with 60 percent of capacity lost.

Later, Chunghwa said connections to the U.S., China and Canada were mostly restored, but 70 percent of the capacity to Japan was still down, along with 90 percent of the capacity to Southeast Asia.

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with the Washington-based research firm TeleGeography, said it was the largest telecommunications failure in years.

"The magnitude of the break is surprising because Taiwan is otherwise a very well connected system," Beckert said. He noted that cables get cut and disrupted all the time, but there's usually enough backup capacity on other lines to keep traffic flowing without customers noticing an interruption.

But with multiple cables broken at once, Internet traffic around the Pacific was disrupted. Hong Kong telephone company PCCW Ltd., which also provides Internet service, said the quake cut its data capacity in half. Internet access was cut or severely slowed in Beijing, said an official from China Netcom, China's No. 2 phone company.

The official, who would not give his name, said the cause was thought to be the earthquake, but he had no further details.

The Internet Traffic Report Web site, which monitors Internet connectivity in several countries, showed that packet loss, or the percentage of data that doesn't reach its destination, spiked sharply in Asia at the time of the earthquake, rising from about 10 percent to more than 40 percent.

On Wednesday afternoon U.S. time, the Web site showed limited connectivity to China, Singapore and Indonesia, while Japan and Taiwan were apparently back to normal.

KDDI Corp., Japan's major carrier for international calls, said its fixed-line telephone service was affected by the quake. Company spokesman Haruhiko Maeda said customers were having trouble calling India and the Middle East, which usually use the cables near Taiwan. Maeda said the company was rerouting calls through the U.S. and Europe.

South Korea's largest telecom company, KT, said that the lines it uses were damaged, affecting dozens of companies and institutions, including South Korea's Foreign Ministry.

In the U.S., Cisco Systems Inc.'s Linksys division warned that customer support call centers for its home networking gear were affected by the outage, but other companies with overseas call centers reported few problems.

Molly Faust, a spokeswoman for American Express Co., the global travel and payment card company headquartered in New York, said the company "wasn't experiencing any customer service issues in Asia."

She said that there were "some interruptions" of the company's computer systems in Taiwan, but added: "It didn't impact customers because we could use backup systems and manual processes."

Tyco International Ltd. said it has a Taiwan-based cable-laying ship heading to the area for repairs.

"Pretty much everything south of Taiwan has been reported at fault," said Frank Cuccio, vice president of marine services at Morristown, New Jersey-based Tyco Telecommunications.

Cuccio expects the ship to be in position in a few days. It then takes three to five days to repair each cable, but mudslides set off by the earthquake can complicate matters by covering the cables, making them harder to retrieve from the bottom.

Cuccio said the ruptures are more than 10,800 feet below sea level, too deep for the remote-controlled submersibles that otherwise would find the cables. Instead, the ship will drag grapnels along the bottom to find them.

The cables on the deep ocean floor are just two-thirds of an inch, a testament both to the immense data capacity of optical fiber and the fragility of the links that form the global telecommunications network.