Shipping company sued over cable cut

China Telecom is taking Shanghai Xinhai Air Shipping in Guangzhou to court for allegedly severing its undersea cable and disrupting Internet services for the third time this year, said the online edition of the South China Morning Post.

According to the report, the mainland's largest telecom operator filed a lawsuit against the shipping company on September 27, asking the local maritime affairs court to award them 40 million yuan (about S$8.6 million) in compensation for economic damages.

As a result of the fault, Internet traffic in most parts of Asia had slowed to a crawl from around noon on September 20.

Surfers in Singapore also experienced some delay in accessing Web sites hosted outside of the Republic. This is because the SingTel Internet Exchange (STIX) leases bandwidth on the US-China cable to local Internet service providers.

Although the defendant is maintaining it wasn't its ship that severed the cable, experts point out that most ships now have global positioning systems that would indicate their positions at a particular time.

When contacted today, Singapore Telecommunications declined to comment on whether it would be taking a similar action against the defendent. "We do not comment on such legal issues," said company spokesperson Jesmine Ong.

The fault, which occurred on the China-US and SEA-ME-WE3 cables about 30 km off Shantou in China, was suspected to have been due to shipping vessels dragging their anchors along the sea bed.

SEA-ME-WE3 runs 38,000 km from Germany to Japan, and is owned by telcos including Reach, Singapore Telecommunications, KDD Japan, France Telecom, Telekom Malaysia, PT Indosat and Deutsche Telecom. The 27,000 km China-US cable, meanwhile, is owned by a consortium including Reach, SingTel, Concert, China Telecom, Japan Telecom, Korea Telecom, KDD Japan, Sprint and Telekom Malaysia.

Reach Communications spokesperson Martin Ratia could not comment directly on the China Telecom lawsuit, but said that the owners of affected cables would normally investigate the circumstances of the case very carefully before deciding to take any action to claim damages.

China Telecom could not be contacted for comment, due to a national holiday.

In February, a China-US cable failure caused similar problems and less than a month later, another fault occurred on the same cable.