Internet still slow in China

Due to the Earthquake off of Taiwan on Dec. 26 the Internet here in China is slow if connecting at all with North America. I’m worried as we start school on Monday that our Online classroom (Moodle Site) won’t be available to students and staff.

The earthquake cut fiber-optic lines between Asia and North America making the rerouting of Internet traffic a slow very slow process. According to the news tonight (here in China anyway) it will be January 20th before they can get all the fiber-optics fixed. The news report said that one of the cables was swept away by the current making it hard to find.

Meanwhile, I continue to slowly try and get things done online. Some sites, such as Google, MSN, and Skype seem to be running fine, but most others are running very slow. My guess would be that the big players have rerouted there way around the broken lines some how.

One report on the news talked about over 10,000 .com domain names being lost as people here in China and the rest of Asia were not able to renew their registration of their names. Ouch! There are conflicting reports about this so not sure if it’s true, but if you can’t connect to renew your domain as far as I understand it, it would go back to the public where anyone waiting could grab it.

If nothing else I think this shows just how connected we all are. CCTV9, the English channel here in China, has ran a couple reports on the amount of money companies have lost do to not being able to be part of a supply chain. It’s amazing how reliant we have become on the Internet and the connections it allows us to have to each other around the world.

Verizon is building a direct China-US cable which will be great! Now if only we can get the Chinese government to understand that the Firewall they have in place does more harm than good we’d be in business.

(Just how slow, writing and posting this article took 30 minutes…ug)

[tags]China[/tags]

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