Cutting (internet & telephone) ties to the mainland!

Earthquakes are terrible things. They kill and main people, and destroy the lives of the unfortunate people living in the affected region. Earthquakes also destroy infrastructure. Like Asia's major internet and telephony lines to the world.

Since late on Boxing Day, international internet and telephone access from Shanghai (China, and probably the rest of Asia) has been an absolute nightmare.

Needless to say that many businesses and people have suffered major disruptions to their usual way of life. Some may even have their businesses at considerable risk. On the Shanghai Expat website, I've read many stories about how people are coping with this problem, with some even resorting to posting hardcopy work and sending them in overnight express mail just to keep international business moving. For others (like myself), I've essentially been cut-off from both my work (a little web site construction), the means of finding work (job sites), contacting my father on his birthday (sorry Dad!), checking Australia's demolition of England in the The Fourth Ashes Test Match, and several other means of procrastination that are firmly entrenched in my life. The only internet connections that appeared to be unaffected was within mainland China and to neighbouring countries, and I wasn't too interested in scrounging around looking for alternatives. I'm not that far gone!

This is the first successful attempt at reaching my US-hosted website and main email server for the last four days. Luckily most of my friends and family knew they could sporadically reach me on my Gmail account, but I even found access to that really spotty. At this stage I really wished I was working for one of the MNC's with their own dedicated networks (or at least a VPN) to establish connection to North American, European and Australian websites. For me, Skype sometimes worked but for most of the time it acted like an OCD-sufferer by constantly logging in and out.

The worst thing about this event is that there doesn't appear to be any Plan B for restoring the network capacity within a reasonable time-frame (i.e. 24 hours). At this stage, it may be 3 to 4 weeks until the previous network capacity is restored.

I have learnt quite a lot from this internet melt-down. The sea-bed communication networks are amazing, but fragile. And in Asia's case, it now appears to have design faults and has been poorly planned. This incident has confirmed that my expat life is truly entwined in the internet. As I didn't have any alternatives to solve this problems so the only thing left to do was to spend time with my awesome girlfriend, get some fresh air (thanks to the high-winds in Shanghai at the moment), and play Uno with Lin while eating take-away Thai food.

It hasn't been that bad at all really!