Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Bloomberg couldn’t have said it better than news agencies around the world; 2 weeks to repair 6 damaged submarine cables would mean that the better part of south-east Asia have somehow travelled back in time 10 years to pre-historic Internet.

While the official explanation for the time-frame was that most of the time would be spent locating the cables, hauling it to the surface, and then patching it up, I’m more inclined to believe that there are other factors that the officials have failed to mention.

#1: It is winter in the Northern Hemisphere

Whereas people were getting all nicely charred Down Under, we’re freezing out here in the upper half of the world. That includes Singapore, even though we are almost exactly one degree higher than the official bulge-line of our extremely emotional planet, average temperatures of 25 degrees celcius throughout the day makes air-conditioning units redundant, and blankets compulsory at night.

I even have to turn on the water heater to bathe at this time of the year in tropical Singapore; goodness knows how the waters are exactly doing over off Taiwan: divers are going to run the risk of hypothermia if they are not careful.

If I did not recall wrongly, one of the ships rushing to save the Internet originate from Singapore; if this is any indication, Singaporeans will have trouble operating in less than tropical environments, especially if my colleagues are any indicators to go by

#2: Finding a cable amongst the debris

Without casting doubts on the capabilities of the salvation crew, locating a piece of wire that is barely thicker than a marker pen (1.6cm in diameter) in a pond that spans Asia to the United States is no easy feat. Granted that they could have a GPS reading for the location of the cables, but that doesn’t make it any easier, as any experienced user of the GPS would tell you. Readings are accurate up till around 50 metres, and then it is the needle among the haystack.

Not to mention that the cable could have drifted while it floated down into the sea bottom during the laying, or simple displaced to some other weird kink, or simply buried by all the sediments that were thrown up during the earthquake. You would be amazed how much abuse they would let an innocent cable, with the critical task of handling half of the world’s largest continent’s data transfer would be armoured, tagged, and reinforced in some way, but I think we get the point.

#3: Follow-up tremors in the immediate area

In case you didn’t know, earthquakes don’t come alone. While its favourite buddy is the tsunami, this doesn’t stop its own siblings from escaping and running their own shows with their own friends after Big Brother had his fun. I won’t want people to be trapped on a ship when a tsunami strikes, it is going to be quite ugly.

I didn’t know that I could come up with so much plausible rubbish in 5 minutes: either I am a professional blogger, or I must be definitely so bored that I was able to come up with armchair theories about why a cable cut would take that long to be repaired. If you were looking for some facts on the cable cut, I hope you had as much fun reading this as much as I have enjoyed wasting your time

Have a great weekend!

Filed under: General