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Typhoon slows down Internet

SOME Singapore Internet users may be experiencing slowdowns on the Information Superhighway, especially when trying to access websites hosted in the United States and Taiwan.

Typhoon Morakot, which has triggered Taiwan's worst flooding in 50 years, has damaged the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 submarine cable system through which bytes of information travel.

This means that people trying to connect to gaming servers in the US or trying to instant message friends overseas may find it difficult to connect.

A SingTel spokesman said that restoration works on the cable system have begun.

'Our engineers are in the process of diverting Internet traffic to other cable systems. We expect the situation to return to acceptable levels within the next 24 hours,' he said.

The last time a major outage happened was in December 2006, when quakes off Taiwan severed several cables at once, causing the Net to go down.

Review

The typhoon at Taiwan is very serious and has caused many lives. Now, the typhoon has even caused the internet to slow down due to the the damage of wires. I think that the wires at the Taiwan area should be more well protected as Taiwan is a earthquake and typhoon-prone area and damage are often caused to these wires. This will be a big influence to the world, by letting the internet go down at United States and other countries because of a natural disaster at the other end of the world.

I have a few suggestions to prevent this problems from occurring again. They can protect the wires by either enhancing the covering of the wires or adding additional wires somewhere else, to let diverting of the signals fast if something happened to the others. They can also change the place where these important wires are situated, like changing them to places where natural disasters are rare, so that the chance of damage to them can be minimized. Although the damage this time is only slowing down the internet, the last time in December 2006 has caused the net to go down.The next time, the same thing may happen, or worst, something worse may happen.