This year is the year of the pig, and while no one I know of has put together a horoscope that tells you how your year will go technologically, we can all hope it will be a good one.

For some people though, the New Year has gotten off to a rocky start technologically, with the Taiwan earthquake severely disrupting communications all over the region; and not only all over the region, but the links between us and other countries like Australia and Canada. My brother was only able to contact us yesterday, and today I had a bit of a slow internet connection. Maybe they’re rerouting their lines now. By the time this article sees print the lines should be mostly up and running again, but the forecast was it could take weeks to get everything back to a hundred percent.

The whole problem is that the cables that carry all the information we send and receive are underwater, and that makes them hard to get to for repairs. And even when a ship gets out there, fiber optic cables are notoriously difficult to fix.

Information is transferred using light that travels through the glass fibers in the cable. I’m no expert but basically the inside of the glass is perfectly reflective (or close to it). This means hardly any light escapes at all; it just bounces around inside undiminished until it reaches the other end. There is some degrading of the signal due to imperfections in the glass, but even with that fiber optics can carry signals over very long distances.

This works well but it is also so sensitive that any small crack or dent or depression can ruin the glass’ "perfect reflectivity" and hinder the beam. If the cable is broken, then the information is lost altogether.

Fiber optic cables are created in one go, meaning they make one long strand at a time, and don’t splice short strands together to make longer ones. This is so that it keeps its internal reflectivity as perfect as possible.

A degraded signal goes to a booster every so many miles to increase the signal, and then it gets sent off for so many more miles until the next booster. If boosters were damaged during the quake, I imagine it would not mean much more than simply replacing the signal amplifier. If the cable itself is damaged, which I suspect is what happened, then that’s a bit tougher.

There’s no easy way to "heal" glass threads underwater, and maintain the total internal reflection properties of the glass. If you’re going to pull out the fibers to fix them, then you might as well lay new ones down while you’re at it; they’ll end up being more reliable.

So that’s where the whole problem comes from, the difficulty of fixing the communication lines across the oceans. By next month, things should be back up, if all goes well. As always, anyone who wants to get in touch with me you can email me at broadbandmb@yahoo.com.