The end of December seems to be nature's favoured time to remind humanity of its fragility.  Two years ago, it was the Indian Ocean Tsunami.  This year, it was an earthquake off Taiwan's southern coast.  Without warning, people across East Asia woke up on Wednesday morning without email and the Internet, and in many cases, without long-distance telephone connections.

Fiber-optics cables from at least 6 to 8 undersea networks were damaged by the Taiwan earthquake which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale.  Industry experts warned that it will take between 3 to 6 weeks for the cables to be fully repaired.  Besides the extensive damage to the cables, the earthquake also shifted sand on the seabed, making it harder to locate the cables, thus slowing down recovery and repair work.

As connections went down, suddenly everyone - from brokers to ebay traders - did not feel so secure anymore in the idea of being able to work anytime, anywhere.  Currency transactions were disrupted, e-commerce was halted and companies in the US had difficulties to get in touch with their suppliers in East Asia.

Global inter-connectedness, some thing everyone has come to take for granted, really does seem to hang on a thread.  Asia could do with more threads.  As the world's fastest growing region, it has fewer cable networks connecting its power centres with each other and the rest of the world than do Europe and the US.

Between 2000 and June 2006, the number of Internet users in China alone grew from a modest 8 million to a staggering 123 million!  That was a 15-fold jump in just 6 short years. Yet the undersea cable networks were not proportionately increase to support this exponential growth.  In fact, new investments in cable systems dried up just as demand soared, as telecom comapnies held back following the bust to the dot-com boom of the 1990s.

As cable repair vessel rush off from Singapore, India, Philippines and Japan to Taiwanese sea for repair operations, telecoms consortiums in the region will have the important task of reviewing the fragility and vulnerablitiy of the world's telecommunications network caused by a few seconds of quaking and trashing out future contingencies to avoid a total melt-down scenario, which the world simply could not afford.