Quake cuts off much of Asia Internet

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <[email protected]>
Date: December 28, 2006 10:10:45 AM EST
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: [IP] Quake cuts off much of Asia Internet

At 02:21 PM 12/27/2006, Richard Forno wrote:

> A 7.1-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Taiwan on Tuesday  
> night, which
> was followed by several smaller quakes in the region, apparently  
> damaged the
> vast network of underwater cables that enables modern communication.
>
> "The Internet capacity in Taiwan is about 40 percent now, so the  
> service is
> jammed," said a spokesman for Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's largest phone
> company on Tuesday.
>
> The disruption was widespread, hitting China, Japan, South Korea,  
> Taiwan,
> Singapore, Hong Kong and elsewhere, with knock-on effects as far  
> away as
> Australia for companies whose Internet is routed through affected  
> areas.

Dave: IPers might be interested in knowing that, as a result of this
slowdown, we have already seen a noticeable decrease in the amount of
spam we've received -- much of which originates in Taiwan, China, and
South Korea. (The flow of spam from South America, Poland, Germany,
Italy, and American "zombie" machines -- the latter mostly on cable
modems and Verizon DSL or FIOS -- has, alas, continued unabated. But
the impact is still significant.)

Because more than 95% of the traffic we receive from the Asia-Pacific
region is spam, it occurs to me that if these countries made an  
effort to
limit the amount of spam they generated, it might ameliorate or even
eliminate the slowdown while the fiber optic cables were repaired.

--Brett Glass, LARIAT.NET