This article basically confirms the fear that we all have about the Internet connectivity in Malaysia. It sucks, the higher-ups know about it but can't be arsed (corruption? cronism? monopoly?). This article was written by the CEO of Jaring in 2006 but to date, nothing has improved.

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The need for alternative routes suddenly popped up after being shocked and shaken by the earthquake in Taiwan. Most people now realised that almost all our communications life-lines are passing through the earthquake prone areas. As Murphy's Law says, "anything that can go wrong will wrong at the wrong time". While we are taking a little year-end rest, we are shocked by the "Internet Tsunami". 
Malaysia is served directly by a few undersea fibre optic cables that land on Malaysia's shore. These include APCN (Asia Pacific Cable Network), SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe) and FLAG (Fibre optic Links Across the Globe). Unfortunately many other cable systems do not land in Malaysia. Our neighbour has taken much a more strategic approach long time ago resulting in many more cable systems landed over there. I always feel uneasy about this shortcoming for many years since I became involved with the Internet. As a result, we have very few alternatives for totally independent sub-marine cable systems to go out of the country. The situation is really scary. 

Even within the country we still need to do a lot of things to improve our diversity. I still remember an old story where we wanted to have two independent links from Semenanjung to East Malaysia. So we took two rather expensive long distance lines - Johor Bahru-Kuching and Kuantan-Kota Kinabalu. Little did we realise then that the Johor Bahru-Kuching was actually served via Johor Bahru-Kuantan-Kota Kinabalu-Kuching as there was only one fibre between Semenanjung and East Malaysia. So when our Kuantan to Kota Kinabalu link went down, both links were down. Our carefully planned diversity went into smoke. 

Back to the current problems, here are two diagrams depicting the failures on two of the major cable systems that I happen to know. 

The four failures indicated above are already enough to isolate communications infrastructure of the South East Asia and Hong Kong from the rest of the world. The situation is much worse when we have many other failures occurring at the same time near the same place. 

For Malaysia, similar cable cuts anywhere to the east will have devastating impacts as we are experiencing now. The alternative is to use other cable systems to provide adequate route diversity at all the time. But which cables? 

To be truly diversified a country or a service provider must use at least two cable systems (the more the better) where (a) each one is operated by completely independent operator (b) no portion of one cable system is shared with the other (c) the two cables are physically separated from each other by at least a few hundred kilometre throughout the whole of the protected route. If these tests are done on the existing cable systems being used today, almost all will fail. 

Such independent routes are already in existence today. One route is through the familiar Hong Kong - Taiwan - Japan. Another route is through India, the Middle East and Europe. Two cable systems, SEA-ME-WE and FLAG run from Europe through South East Asia to Japan. However, the capacity on the westward route is not adequate to serve the current demand. This has pushed up the price and forced almost every one to live with an affordable but risky situation. In my view, a service provider can take such risk. But a country should not. 

This is an issue to be pondered in months to come. Meanwhile I have been informed that at least fives ships are now working to repair the damaged cables near Taiwan. The sea condition in the area is very rough. It could take 7 to 10 days to repair a cable if everything works as planned, weather permitting. In parallel, temporary circuits are also being put in place to ease the current congestion. As for JARING, we now see 100% higher capacity compared to yesterday. It is however still about 40% of the normal capacity. 

Dr Mohamed Awang Lah is the CEO of Jaring Communications Sdn Bhd. He was involved in the thenemerging Internet technology about 25 years ago, which led to the pioneering of the Internet services in Malaysia. This article is written in his personal capacity. - 30 December 2006

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