Sluggish Internet Services Affects Banks & Services By Waleed PD Mahdini and Shareen Han

Bandar Seri Begawan - Internet services nationwide experienced slowness of services yesterday affecting some of the financial and public services.

According to TelBru, Brunei's top telecommunications company, they were informed by the Internet Network Operation Centre in Hong Kong that Tuesday's earthquake at Taiwan had caused a major internet outage throughout the entire region. A spokesperson from TelBru, speaking on anonymity, commented that "the extent of the damage is still unknown".

Several major regional Submarine Cable Networks were severely affected thus resulting in a number of regional internet service providers to re-route their internet traffic to the very same cable segment that is utilised by Te1Bru.

It is this rerouting activity that has caused the current `bottleneck' conditions experienced by internet traffic in Brunei. However, TelBru has assured that it is coordinating closely with other regional cable providers to resolve this problem at the earliest.

However, international cyber experts have predicted that the undersea submarine cable repair works could take months to complete, at the very earliest.

Interruptions were experienced all across the sultanate for internet services, especially by agencies and institutions that rely heavily on the internet. Flight operations for Royal Brunei Airlines confirmed that they were not majorly affected but the Civil Aviation's duty forecaster at the Meteorological Department commented that they were very much affected as their systems relied heavily on the internet for information, updates and numerical weather predictions.

Some banks such as HSBC pointed out that because they utilise an internal system that does not go up to cyberspace, their services were not affected by the interruptions. However, Pierre Imhoff, the General Manager of Baiduri Bank commented that they were unable to establish connections, including its back-up line to the Western Union host system in the United States, since the interruptions yesterday morning.

As salaries are now due, he also commented that the bank is temporarily unable to process any Western Union remittance service, due to these interruptions. He went on to say that they "have been assured by our telecommunications service providers locally that they were making all efforts to re-establish the connections as soon as possible". However, he confirmed that Baiduri Bank's internet banking, card acceptance services and ATM networks are fully operational.

The earthquake that struck off Taiwan's southern coast on Tuesday recorded a magnitude of 6.7 from Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau and a magnitude of 7.1 by the US Geological "Survey, killing two people and affecting major undersea cables. Two of Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom were affected and South Korea's top service provider, KT Corp, said that six submarine cables were knocked out by the earthquakes. A spokesman from Korea's KT Corp confirmed "it is not yet known when services can be fully restored".

China Telecommunications Group, the country's biggest fixed-line telephone operator said the earthquakes had affected lines "from the Chinese mainland to places including the Taiwan area, the United States and Europe, and many have been cut". PCCW, Hong Kong's main fixed-line telecommunications provider, said several undersea cables it part-owned had also been damaged. "Data transfer is down by half," a spokeswoman revealed.

SingTel, Southeast Asia's top phone company, and local rival StarHub Ltd, also said that their customers were suffering slow access to Internet pages.

Some disruptions were also reported in other regional currency trading, especially the important Tokyo currency market in Japan.

Global information company Reuters Group Plc said all users of its services in Japan and South Korea had been affected.

One Tokyo foreign exchange trader said "there are many currencies in which marketmaking is being conducted via Reuters and such currencies such as the Australian dollar and the British pound are in a very tenuous situation now".-- Courtesy of The Brunei Times

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