Is China's Internet as Breakable as its Toys?

Last December, a 7.1 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan severely damaged Asia’s undersea fiber-optic cables, disrupting telecommunication circuits across the continent.

China and Southeast Asia saw their communications capacity fall to between 2 and 10 percent, and though a portion of service has since been rerouted to alternative fixed lines and suicidally slow satellite transmissions, the P.R.C. has yet to fully recover from the technological aftershocks, what Mainlanders are now referring to as the "World Wide Wait.

Repair status is conflicting, with Chinese telecom officials publicly alternating between evasive ("the work is slow because of complicated conditions"), blameful ("the repairs are done by other companies we commissioned") and unrealistically optimistic ("a few more days"), as quoted in the state-run media.

International news sources cite a more likely and longer completion date of early-March for a return to full capacity, perhaps due to what global news service AFP disturbingly reports as China "relying on 19th century technology to fix a 21st century problem.

In an effort to downplay the crisis, China precipitately announced that it expects to become the world’s largest Internet user, overtaking the United States with an estimated 137 million users. That’s quite a bullish forecast for a country that has suffered nationwide telecommunications outages since the new year.

In fact, internet blackouts are nothing new to foreigners residing in the People’s Republic, who are accustomed to limited access to overseas sites that have been blocked by the central government’s web monitoring entity, commonly referred to as The Great Firewall of China.

But the newest online paralysis resulting from the recent natural and technological calamity has most certainly affected international businesses in Mainland China, many whom rely on consistent online communications and B2B transactions to stay above international water. Even multinational conglomerates Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, who are already struggling in the Asian market, are now regularly met with "cannot display" time-out errors.

Conversely, China’s e-commerce giants just don’t understand what all the fuss is about. China News Service reports that amidst the first several weeks of Internet outages, Chinese-based ISPs boasted a 99 percent uptime as the country’s largest web corporations including Sina, Baidu, Alibaba, Tom and Tencent saw their site traffic, and earnings, multiply.

But for China’s Internet-deprived expat community from Beijing to the Bund, hope is literally on the Verizon. A consortium of international telecom providers including China Telecom, CNC and U.S. carrier Verizon have jointly invested $500 million in the construction of a new Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) Cable Network connecting Mainland China directly with the United States.

The next-generation submarine optical cable system, expected to be completed in 2008, will span the Asia-Pacific at 60 times the present capacity, rendering obsolete the damaged FNAL cables beneath the Taiwan Strait.

Indubitably, China’s easily-crippled telecommunications infrastructure and the prolonged aftermath can be blamed on poor foresight and co-dependent technology and is both a devastating episode for foreign companies in China and a chin check for a nation striving to compete as a 21st century world player.

But if the completion of a bigger and better trans-Pacific cable network has anything to do with the cause for the delay, then foreign and Chinese companies alike will just have to wait that much longer to resume to normal operating speeds.

TOM CARTER is the author of 'CHINA: Portrait of a People,' a definitive 600-page book of photography due out winter 2007 from Hong Kong publisher Blacksmith Books.