Dial-up Nostalgia and Earthquakes
Hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and I apologize if I didn’t get back to you earlier with a reply. If you weren’t aware of of the earthquake that took place off southern Taiwan just yesterday of a magnituude of 7.1 and 7.0 on the Richter scale, you probably wouldn’t have been aware of the impact it’s had on us poor people here in China. You might be wondering how does the earthquake in Taiwan affect your internet connection in Shanghai? Well, supposedly the earthquake has had a severely deterimental effect on the internet cables in the ocean.
So this morning, I woke my computer from sleep but wasn’t able to get to any sites. I originally figured that it was a broadband issue (as it almost usually is). When I got to work I realized that it wasn’t just my connection at home but EVERYONE had this problem. Then my friend and I deducted that the load times of web pages only affected international sites and local sites didn’t have a problem. You know the feeling you get when you want to find any recent news or if anyone else on the internet has had the same problem, but you can’t access it? It’s like giving me a guitar pick with no guitar…
But fortunately I was able to squeeze some information from some RSS feeds and from word of mouth about the earthquake affecting it. So my question is to why I was able to access the internet at normal speeds last night at midnight, since the earthquake was earlier in the evening? And if they’re to repair the lines, what do they have to do to fix them? If they’re broken do they have to re-lay the lines into the bottom of the Pacific? I mean, how in the world do you do something like that? And how long is that supposed to take? It’s not like I can snorkel under the water surface with a soldering iron or some duct tape and fix a tear in the line? Welcome any thoughts…
Oh yes, if you’re reading this from within the country, you can probably access this news article faster..
