Re:Let's wait and see (Score 4, Informative)

it is very hard to tell, according to the news, only 1 or 2 cables are actually working among the 7 cables in the sea. first of all, not all the cable systems have the same bandwidth. most of the submarine cable systems are segmented, and traffic is routed to the "landing station". different cable systems have different landing stations in the country. the cable systems in HKG have 4 or 5 different landing station. as for taiwan, the map that i am referring to - 3 in northern taiwan, and 1 in southern taiwan. then, traffic will get re-routed to an alternate path within a cable system if it's designed as non-linear system. otherwise, if the cable system is linear, the traffic will actually need to get to another peering (interconnection point) and hop to another cable system for re-routing. consider the path from asia to US, those re-routing can easily cost application timeout. also, not all the cable systems have the same amount remaining capacity. since each submarine cable system is not likely owned by one individual provider (usually it's 2 or more and it works like consortium), so a wide range of customers will be impacted. and it's a ripple effect ... the only 2 cables that are available are simply being OVERLOADED with unexpected traffic. in a nut shell, it's impossible to tell the impact for a isolated region(in this case, taiwan). however, if a company has purchased a totally diverse path and have their traffic re-route to an alternate path, they will be okay if they re-routed the traffic to Japan, or Australia, and then go to US. damn it! who would think that 7 cable systems (EAC, FLAG, APCN, APCN2, SMW3, C2C, etc) are all having landing station/cables in taiwan. now we are talking about diversity in the sea ... it's a physical layer issue (layer 1) ... www.telegraphy.com has nice cable maps, but you need to subscribe to see the map.