Philippine Internet Slowed Down to a Crawl
Remember the incident that happened in December of 2006 where an undersea cable was cut because of the earthquake in the the coast of Taiwan? Today Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) undersea cable network between China and Taiwan suffered a serious cable fault in segment 2.
At about 10:50 a.m. on Wednesday, local time, an alarm signaled a cable fault on Segment 7 of APCN2, which connects Hong Kong and Shantou, China. The disruption caused a temporary loss of service on the undersea link but all customers that use the cable were soon shifted to capacity on other cables, according to a source familiar with the situation.
The exact cause of the APCN2 fault was not immediately known. The alarm indicated the disruption was caused by a “single point of failure,” which suggests a variety of possibilities, including a technical failure or a cable cut, the source said.
Exact same thing happened in 2006 wherein all ISPs here in the Philippines slowed down to a crawl. Right now PLDT, Globe Telecom and Digitel are very slow to almost no connection at all. I have to refresh my browser several times for google.com to load. I hope they’ll fix the cable as soon as possible and not take months like what happened in 2006.
On a side note, East Asia Crossing (EAC) cable is also under repair which is expected to be done by August 20.
In December 2006 after a submarine cable break such as we have now,it took the rest of Asia less than 48 hours to get back to normal after such a break, it took PLDT over one month to get back to normal and lost the Philippines millions as companies moved out. Lets hope they don’t do the same, I stuck with it last time, but if it lasts more than 3 days this time I will move my business out of the Philippines forever. Sorry to all my faithful workers that I will have to lay off but PLDT and their bad service gives me no choice.