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Cable Reparation Kicks off
The US$10 million restoration of a troubled and critical China-US Internet cable near the mouth of the Yangtze River began yesterday, said an official with the East China Sea Branch of the State Oceanographic Bureau in Shanghai.
The repairs are expected to take more than half a month, Ye Min, an official with the bureau, said.
Last Friday, just 30 days after another section of the same cable broke down on the high seas 374 kilometres east of China's Chongming Island, it was clipped again.
The new accident occurred on a segment between Shanghai and Shantou in South China's Guangdong Province, not a major route for Internet traffic on the Chinese mainland and thus not as large a calamity as the first event.
Yet both cable cuts caused online woes for Taiwan Province users.
Officials speculate that a fishing boat may have severed the line. It is believed that a fishing boat wandered into the area and accidentally tangled an anchor or fishing net with the cable. Either the gear broke the cable or the fisherman cut the cable to save their valuable fishing gear, said Ke Chang, a Beijing official in charge of cable maintenance with the oceanographic bureau.
Ke said the cable has been broken seven times since its establishment. It was placed deliberately away from the river mouth's various fishing areas, but fishing boats have damaged it anyway.
China Telecom has tried to ward off trouble by relocating the cable over the years at a cost of US$12 million, but that effort has not solved the problem either. Even if the responsible fishermen could be caught, it is unlikely they could afford even a fraction of the repair costs, Ke said.
Ke said the government and cable owners will have to do more to safeguard the cable.
China Telecom is trying. The company is promoting cable protection in some areas, equipping larger fishing boats with geological positioning systems and promising to compensate fishermen for lost gear if fishermen don't clip the cable to disentangle.
But that is a large burden for any single enterprise, so the government will mainly prod China Telecom to improve its signage warning of the cable, Ke said. He also said his department is improving the country's related regulations to better protect the cables.
Source: China Daily
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