Press Release

Friday, January 05, 2007
RESTORATION OF INTERNATIONAL LINKS FOR INTERNET SERVICES PROGRESSING ON TRACK

Telekom Malaysia Berhad ™ is pleased to inform its customers that the Internet service to Malaysia, which is experiencing some degradation in performance due to the international links outage caused by the earthquake off Taiwan on December 26, 2006, is well-mitigated and on track to full restoration, with more than 50% of its services restored to-date.



The current situation is attributed to a Richter 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck off the southern coast of Taiwan on December 26, 2006 which caused a major breakdown to 5 cable systems; namely APCN, APCN2, SMW3, CUCN and FLAG in the Pacific basin. Due to that, 97 voice circuits, 43 data circuits and 8.5Gbps traffic capacity for TMNet, amounting to a total bandwidth of 80xSTM1 were affected. All these cable systems route the country's Internet traffic, with the bulk of it going through APCN2.



Restoration and/or rerouting of data services is being achieved either by purchasing additional bandwidth from international providers, or capacity swapping with other corresponding carriers. All customers will benefit from TM's immediate actions as their services were restored in phases since the incident occurred. TM's major customers with dedicated leased lines had their services fully restored by January 2, 2007 ahead of the initial target of January 8, 2007, which was committed by TM earlier.



Through its longstanding and strategic partnerships with other global carriers in Europe, China, Hong Kong and Japan, TM was able to reroute traffic through Europe and China to the U.S., while receiving concerted assistance and intense efforts from them to restore circuits throughout the recent holiday season.



With regards to overall capacity restoration, TM is on track to recover approximately 80 per cent bandwidth capacity for Internet traffic to US by January 12, 2007 and full restoration is expected by 20 Jan 2007. This will be good news for its affected Internet customers, which include other local ISPs who are also dependent on TM for their backhaul connections.



TM Malaysia Business Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa said: "This episode has clearly pointed out how dependent the Asian countries are on these links and it has certainly persuaded many providers, TM included, to rethink our respective business continuity strategies for the future in view of the Pacific basin's susceptibility to natural disasters."



"This recent disruption of our Internet services has also highlighted to us the sheer number of local sites that are not hosted locally in the country. Malaysia has more than sufficient capacity for web hosting services and it would be timely for us to collectively have a change of mindset with regards to our local capabilities in hosting Malaysian content," he added.

"I would like to encourage all organizations and individuals to host their websites locally not only to leverage on the country's strong infrastructure for hosting services but also to be more self-reliant to ensure that disasters like this do not have such impact on them. This directly fits in with the purpose of having the recently launched Malaysian Internet Exchange (MyIX) for improving domestic traffic and keeping it within the country."



Currently, TM is already a member of all major consortium cable systems in the Asia Pacific region with ownership of capacity varying between 4%-7% in the consortium cable systems. These cable systems include APCN, APCN2, CUCN and SMW3.



Not withstanding that, TM is still looking at plans to develop other consortium cable systems to provide for future capacity requirements as well as diversity purposes. In fact, TM is already in the process of developing another consortium link to the U.S. through an alternative route. This is for redundancy and resilience purposes as well as to meet growing requirements from customers.



TM also has investment stakes in other global consortium cable systems like SMW4, SAFE, JUCN and DMCS. However, Zamzamzairani said TM would continue to develop more strategic alliances with additional points of presence globally to further strengthen its global footprint and to further ensure its network resilience.

Zamzamzairani also assures its customers that TM will not hesitate to make additional investments in funds or resources in its endeavour to speed up the restoration process as customer convenience and satisfaction is the main priority for TM now. Thus far, TM, through APCN2 Cable consortium, has already made a commitment to expedite cable repair work by engaging additional cable ships to the repair site. This effort is carried out at a cost to the consortium and TM's share to the cost is amounting to half a million ringgit.

The 26 regional consortium members are already contributing to a shared pool of funds to finance the restoration work being done.  Some of the restoration works were delayed due to the availability of cable ships and uncharacteristically bad weather in the region.



The recent earthquake disrupted telecommunications services between Malaysia to Taiwan, Korea, Japan and U.S.A. Of direct consequence to Malaysian Internet users is the Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) submarine cable fault between Shantou, China and Tanshui, Taiwan and between Lantau, Hong Kong and Chongming, China, which route the main bulk of the Internet traffic for Malaysia.



Fortunately, due to the strong footprint TM has established globally, all cables from Malaysia towards the West were not affected by the earthquake. These include SAFE, SMW4, FLAG (covering Indian Ocean) and SMW3 (covering Indian Ocean and Europe)



Customers can call TM Net Customer Interaction Centre at 1-300-88-9515 (24 hours) or 1-300-88-1515 from 8:00 a.m. till midnight, or e-mail custcare@tm.net.my for further enquiries.