Australia Players - You may have Network Issues for the Next 6 Weeks, Don't blame ZOS

RinaldoGandolphi

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/07/cable_cut_lops_terabits_off_australias_net_connectivity/

Submarine cable cut lops Terabits off Australia's data bridge

Another of the submarine cables connecting Australia to the world, for data, has broken.

PPC-1, which stretches from Sydney to Guam and has 1.92 terabits per second capacity, is out of service until at least March 7.

TPG's announcement says the fault is around 4,590 km from the cable's Guam landing, which means it's around 3,000 metres below the surface.

The fault notice says engineers first logged a report that “alarms indicated that a submarine line card had lost its payload”, and the company is trying to establish when a repair ship can be dispatched to the location.

In the meantime, traffic is using alternate routes including the Australia-Japan Cable and Southern Cross.

Last year, the SeaMeWe-3 cable which runs from Perth to Asia via Indonesia suffered multiple outages.

The situation is complicated by the Basslink cable outage. As Vulture South reported last week, a repairing the electrical cable connecting Tasmania to the mainland is going to necessitate a visit by cable repair ship the Ile de Re, because Basslink's communication fibre is going to be cut during the operation.

The Ile de Re would be the default repair ship for PPC-1, so there's likely to be a lot of messages flying around working out whether it can fit a trip to Guam into its schedule, or if another ship has to be called in.

The cut also represents a challenge to PPC-1's owner, TPG, as the telco and ISP has recently offered vastly increased download allowances for its customers. That's the kind of thing an integrated carrier that owns a submarine cable can do. TPG's investors will be hoping its also invested in lots of local caching and contracts for backup bandwidth, as if it hasn't the cost of landing data promised to users will soon stack up.

the Internet is redudant yes, but expect the alternate routes to most likely become saturated....your looking at 6-7 weeks before this is actually fixed...so if you notice severe network issues, this is most likely the reason why.

Contraptions

Austrian? You mean Australian right?

ListerJMC

Interesting. My guild was just talking today about how several guild members from Australia have been complaining about higher latency recently, to the point where they can't really play.

sneaky_t

best work around i have found is wtfast. i had 260 ping before the cable went out, now it sits at around 400. with wtfast my connection is back to normal around 260. not sure why, but its probably sending the data on a different path. works for me (west coast), my buddy over east tried it to and found it to work. need a premium account though (it actually makes gameplay smooth like it should be, not just showing lower number). The best route i found to work is AUS1 to TX6

Scamandros

Have definitely been feeling the effects of this. latency to overseas servers is all over the place and inconsistant, responces ranging from slightly more then normal to 2-3k ping spikes during Aus prime times

Spottswoode

D@mn sharks.