After Shocks in the APAN community from Taiwan Earthquake

The hot topic at the APAN meeting this week in Manila, Philippines was the Taiwan earthquake that took out several undersea telecom cables in December. There were several good presentations about the actual situation of the cables themsevles - and their expected repair times.

There were also several presentations recapping how the connectivity of research and education networks in the region was affected. The key thing that came through for me was that the increased connectivity between countries in the region - the new-ish TEIN2 network is a big factor here - really prevented any one country from being totally cut off (at least for long).

Mostly, things worked as they should and traffic found other available routes around the outages. But there were several hiccups. Particularly, some of the filters that networks had in place, prevented some automatic re-routing. And the date of the event - 26 December - meant that in cases where some sort of higher-level policy decision was needed to allow one network to do something in aid of another, were delayed a bit.

Traffic was re-routed via Hawaii, in particular, to help patch things together.

Since the earthquake, a couple of new cables have been announced for Asia -- with empahsis on not going through the same strait south of Taiwan where the concentration of cables resulted in this large-scale impact.

Medical Missions for Children

Just talked with the organization Medical Missions for Children who broadcast video focusing on medical education 24 hours/day. They do this via satellite and via their connection to the Internet2 network (via NJEdge.net) over a multicast feed. They're looking for information about how much of their audience (primarily healthcare providers, but some content is for healthcare consumers as well) are reachable via their Internet2 connection.

Given that many of the research and education networks reachable (88!) via the Internet2 network also connect at least university hospitals, but in a number of cases other hospital and healthclinics as well, this could be a substantial number. The hard part is getting any really good figures on this.

I did some quick looking for MMC, though and came up with:

General figures on the number of people reachable via some of our R&E networks has been estimated:
+ the GEANT2 project in Europe estimates that "potential[ly] 30 million users, including over 3 million researchers in more than 3,500 research and education institutes across Europe" are reachable via the GEANT2 network.
+ the TEIN2 project in Southeast Asia estimates that "TEIN2 currently supports a community in excess of 30 million users in 10 countries. Its direct links to Europe's GEANT network create a potential user base of more than 60 million"
+ Internet2's own back-of-the-envelope projections are that 7-10Million users are reachable within the US via the Internet2 network