back to article Megaquake cuts Japan phone lines

Telephone communications across Japan have been disrupted following Friday's massive earthquake, although data center operations appear to be holding up. Millions of telephone lines are unavailable across the country, as it seems that a number of undersea cables have been cut or are reporting faults following the quake. The …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. JaitcH
    Unhappy

    Not only Japan cables out - TATA. too

    Last weekend there was a little 'bump' (earthquake) off south VietNam and, concurrently, the TATA cable was damaged. This cable has terminal connections in the USA mainland, Hawaii, Guam, Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei and a spur to VietNam.

    It is used for traffic pointed eastbound where users in Europe want to avoid the London & Atlantic routings.

    They hope to figure out exactly where the damage is and have a cable ship out there next week - if the Japanese damage doesn't take priority.

    In VietNam ISP's FPT Telecom, Viettel Telecom and VDC are affected. VNPT, the government telecom's operator, is fine as it uses a high speed link from Ha Noi through HongKong and connects directly with the U.S.A.

  2. tmh66

    does anyone remember the last big earthquake in northern japan

    didnt it shut down an epoxy factory which supplied a significant amount of substrate packaging for the chip industry. it caused a spike in RAM prices for some time. Is it a good time to buy RAM and CPU upgrades before pricing increases?.

    Not axactly an important consideration for the poor Japanese trying to rebuild their country.

    1. James Woods

      don't remember

      but perhaps it's like the great gasoline oil crisis we had here in the 80's.

      it was fake to drive up the cost of gasoline and the price only went up from there.

      just my guess.

    2. Bill Neal
      Unhappy

      Shortages

      Will this worsen the 3DS shortage? It costs too much already. The system looks nice, but not P$3 nice.

    3. JaitcH
      Happy

      I remember, as I was transiting in Tokyo/Narita that day, that Sumitomo Chemical, ...

      located at Niihama on Shikoku Island, with about half the world market for semiconductor epoxy resin, was downed around 1993 JUL by explosion that hit up prices for DRAMs. Some attributed the explosion to a concurrent earthquake.

      My Lexis-Nexis has a reference to a report on ELECTRONIC NEWS, 1993 JUL 12 edition entitled "Sumitomo epoxy resin plant gutted; IC firms scrambling; supplied 60% of market".

      Hope that helps.

  3. Michael M
    Headmaster

    Vaguely heard of it

    "Tokyo, ... , is home to a number of large data centers run by government, universities, banks, and web hosts."

    Thanks for that info. Who knew?

  4. Chris 15
    FAIL

    Oh for the love of mike

    Can we NOT refer to this as a 'megaquake'! It's an earthquake. No other name is required.

  5. Leeroy
    Thumb Up

    Shakey shakey HD

    I am surprised the storage systems in the data centers are still working as i thought vibrations were very bad for mechanical disks etc. Apart from the actual movement caused by the quakes, racks falling over would probably be a bad thing.

    Would be nice to see some of the systems that they use to reduce the effects of these natural disasters on their infrastructure.

  6. TomCat1346

    Telcoms down

    It has been difficult for my wife to call her brothers, sisters and cousins in the Philippines as well, what with everyone jamming the phone lines to SE Asia.

    She has two nieces who live in Japan, but they live in the Tokyo area and are OK, as is her sister who went to Japan to visit a few days before the 'quake.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like