The Great Firewall of China
Trip Start
Feb 01, 2004
1
20
29
Trip End
Feb 01, 2008
Beijing,
China
Sunday, August 19, 2007
by Tom Carter
In late December of last year, a 7.1 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan severely
damaged Asia's undersea fiber-optic cables, disrupting telecommunication
circuits across the continent.
China and Southeast Asia saw their
communications capacity fall to between 2 and 10 percent, and though a portion
of service has since been rerouted to alternative fixed lines and suicidally
slow satellite transmissions, the P.R.C. has yet to fully recover from the
technological aftershocks, what Mainlanders are now referring to as the "World
Wide Wait.
Repair status is conflicting, with Chinese telecom officials
publicly alternating between evasive ("the work is slow because of complicated
conditions"), blameful ("the repairs are done by other companies we
commissioned") and unrealistically optimistic ("a few more days"), as quoted in
the state-run media.
International news sources cite a more likely and
longer completion date of early-March for a return to full capacity, perhaps due
to what global news service AFP disturbingly reports as China "relying on 19th
century technology to fix a 21st century problem.
In an effort to
downplay the crisis, China precipitately announced that it expects to become the
world's largest Internet user, overtaking the United States with an estimated
137 million users. That's quite a bullish forecast for a country that has
suffered nationwide telecommunications outages since the new year.
In
fact, internet blackouts are nothing new to foreigners residing in the People's
Republic, who are accustomed to limited access to overseas sites that have been
blocked by the central government's web monitoring entity, commonly referred to
as The Great Firewall of China.
But the newest online paralysis resulting
from the recent natural and technological calamity has most certainly affected
international businesses in Mainland China, many whom rely on consistent online
communications and B2B transactions to stay above international water. Even
multinational conglomerates Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, who are already
struggling in the Asian market, are now regularly met with "cannot display"
time-out errors.
Conversely, China's e-commerce giants just don't
understand what all the fuss is about. China News Service reports that amidst
the first several weeks of Internet outages, Chinese-based ISPs boasted a 99
percent uptime as the country's largest web corporations including Sina, Baidu,
Alibaba, Tom and Tencent saw their site traffic, and earnings,
multiply.
But for China's Internet-deprived expat community from Beijing
to the Bund, hope is literally on the Verizon. A consortium of international
telecom providers including China Telecom, CNC and U.S. carrier Verizon have
jointly invested $500 million in the construction of a new Trans-Pacific Express
(TPE) Cable Network connecting Mainland China directly with the United
States.
The next-generation submarine optical cable system, expected to
be completed in 2008, will span the Asia-Pacific at 60 times the present
capacity, rendering obsolete the damaged FNAL cables beneath the Taiwan
Strait.
Indubitably, China's easily-crippled telecommunications
infrastructure and the prolonged aftermath can be blamed on poor foresight and
co-dependent technology and is both a devastating episode for foreign companies
in China and a chin check for a nation striving to compete as a 21st century
world player.
But if the completion of a bigger and better trans-Pacific
cable network has anything to do with the cause for the delay, then foreign and
Chinese companies alike will just have to wait that much longer to resume to
normal operating speeds.
###
Tom Carter of San Francisco is an
internationally published freelance photographer and travel writer
specializing in the People's Republic of China. Tom has traveled extensively
throughout all 33 Chinese provinces and autonomous regions and currently resides
in Beijing.
This article originally appeared on NowPublic.Com
