The Wall Street Journal article "Asian Quake"s Telecom Disruption Exposes Global Networks' Fragility" states:
An earthquake off Taiwan's coast disrupted communications across the Pacific region and Asia yesterday, underscoring a crucial vulnerability of an increasingly globalized economy.
International phone service was cut off or restricted in some regions, and Internet service slowed to a crawl in much of China after the magnitude 6.7 temblor struck late Tuesday, followed by several aftershocks, damaging as many as eight undersea cables. Service to BlackBerry mobile email devices and Bloomberg financial-information terminals was interrupted, and some transactions in currency and other financial markets were disrupted.
Tom Barnett's post "A system perturbed is a rule-set awaken" states:
The question is, how does Asia respond?
As indicated by the absence of the Asian NATO, we see a region with stunted region-wide cooperation on matters of shared vulnerability. This was exposed by SARS, which led to new cooperation that's handled avian flu far better. But on the quakes/disaster relief & recovery stuff in general, we don't yet see the rule sets on sharing and backing each other up that we see well-established ... say... in the American southeast over the past several decades on hurricanes....
Increasingly, investors carefully monitor stuff like quakes simply to foresee such investment shifts like the one called for here. This is why the most important function of system perturbations, besides calls for new regulation/reforms/rules to address the rule-set gaps unveiled, is the signalling to markets for where investments should flow next....
In my post "Nedonna Cable to China," I reported that:
The hardware is being built out for increased communication between the US and China. And one end of the new trans-Pacific cable will be in Nedonna, Oregon.
Developing the Mandarin skills of our students and sending them to China to study share an attribute with the build out of cables to China. They all increase connectivity, and that is an important good.
Follow Up News: NY Times article "Asia Scrambles to Repair Quakes Damages to Data Cables" reports:
Property damage was limited, but six of seven undersea cable systems, accounting for 90 percent of telecommunications capacity of the region, broke “one by one” in the quake and its aftershocks, the Office of the Telecommunications Authority in Hong Kong said.
The cables link countries in North and Southeast Asia to one another and to North America, and the disruption has underscored the vulnerability of the telecommunications infrastructure that the fast-growing region depends on for commercial activity.
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