ALKHOBAR, 29 December 2006 — Tuesday’s earthquake in Taiwan has created anxiety for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at the holy sites who are attempting to contact relatives back home. Pilgrims from Asia should be advised that most Asian nations are experiencing some difficulties with communications. At first it was thought that only Internet traffic was affected but now it is clear that telecoms are struggling as they divert voice communications to satellite connections with mixed results.

Residents in the Kingdom who use Australia-based Orbit’s satellite Internet services have also been affected.

It is thought that six undersea fiber optic cables south of Taiwan, carrying data and voice traffic in China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the US and Taiwan, have been severed. A seventh cable is damaged. Repair ships are on the way to the site, but getting the cables working again could take two to three weeks.

The problem is far reaching. Up to 40,000 subscribers to Orbit SatNet high speed Internet service have been cut off from the Internet and forced to switch to local Internet dial-up as back up.

Orbit SatNet service costs SR640 monthly for a 512kbps/128/kbps shared connection. Orbit sent SMS messages to customers on Wednesday saying they would be compensated for the loss of service.

Internet satellite connections actually use a combination of wireless and cable connections in order to reduce costs and increase speed. While Orbit’s satellite base station in Perth, Australia is still functional, nothing has been done to divert the cable traffic that goes through Taiwan. Subscribers are furious.

“This is ridiculous,” said Aiman Zuhairi an Orbit SatNet subscriber. “Wednesday, Orbit sent its SatNet subscribers an SMS stating the problem and saying we would be compensated. How? Why don’t they have any redundancy or backup? Other national telecoms are switching to satellite from cable during this crisis. Why isn’t Orbit making the switch?”

Telecommunication services in Asia are improving by the hour but there is simply not enough bandwidth to go around.