Internet: South East Asia's daily grind

It all started with a typhoon, and then earthquakes. Nature biting back and undersea cables being damaged.

And so, for internet users across the whole of South East Asia into China and beyong, from Indonesia to Taiwan, Korea and Japan, the internet has started to behave very oddly.

The Telcos are trying to find the damage, and to re-route around it, as best they can.

But, unlike the damage to cables in Europe last year, this has not killed all contact.

There are times when the service hangs. Like when we click "publish" for an article and then nothing happens. But, the for a communications medium, the internet is really bad at telling us why nothing is happening. There isn't even a blue screen of death. Just what appears to be a frozen screen - and transmit indicator lights that are locked on.

Then, all of a sudden, it spurts into life. And for a few moments (perhaps because so many people are so frustrated they've gone to make coffee) it works at a speed that many users in the region only dream of - certainly speeds we rarely see with pages turning in a time comparable to turning on the user's own PC rather than on a server half-way across the world.

Then it stops, or goes slow. So slowly that web pages built item by item, javascript menus appearing in full and then collapsing, style sheets delivering content and then formatting it one block at a time.

And then it either stops or goes back to blistering speed.

The damaged cables, Asia-Pacific Cable Network (APCN) and Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 3 (SMW3), provide core services for many of South East Asia's internet companies, and they are tearing their hair out over the problems they are facing.

One by one, they are issuing statements - ironically on their websites - telling users that they know what the problem is, they just don't know where it is. GLOBE in the Philippines says there are "multiple cuts."

The biggest problem is with the APCN2 cable. That, inevitably, is the busiest of the cables. It services Chongming, Shanghai, China; Shantou, Guangdong Province, China; Lantau Island, Islands District, Hong Kong; Chikura, Chiba Prefecture, Japan; Kitaibaraki, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan; Pusan, South Korea; Kuantan, Pahang State, Malaysia; Batangas Bay in the Philippines; Katong, Singapore; and Tanshui, Taipei County, Taiwan.

Distributed organisations who have people in, say, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea are likely to be suffering internal disruption as well as problems with external communications.

Normal voice comms are not affected - but VoIP is. And much low cost routing traffic uses VoIP at some point in its journey. Inbound landline calls from the UK to Malaysia have been unreliable in the past two days. Enquiries showed that the originator was using a low cost carrier which switched calls onto VoIP as part of that routing.

So now: time to click the "Publish button" and wonder: will it stay or will it go?