Three weeks since the Taiwan earthquake that damaged major undersea cables linking telecommunications in the region, Internet service providers in the Philippines are slowly picking up bandwidth and are expecting to fully recover in the coming weeks.

Luckily for most ISPs, they have anticipated such problems in that they acquired redundant connections through other network providers, which somehow mitigated the possible inconveniences to their customers after the earthquake.

Philippine Internet Service Organization (PISO) Director Jason Yu said in a phone interview that most of the major ISPs in the Philippines were immediately affected by Taiwan earthquakes last December 26.

However, the network providers, on which all third-party ISPs are dependent, immediately moved much of the lost bandwidth to other linkages to be able to stem the problems from the damaged undersea cables.

Likewise, it is common practice among ISPs to get more than one bandwidth provider that would automatically carry the lost capacity from an affected provider.

“Things are improving now, showing additional capacity were already brought online,” Yu said.

Yu said most ISPs still suffer from latency, or lag in their bandwidth due to congestion in cables that are carrying the extra bandwidth. But he said some telecommunication providers are locking down bandwidth-intensive websites to lessen the congestion, in particular is the video website Youtube.

Yu added that they were consistently updated by their network providers regarding the status of their connections. “One time, we received an advisory that there was a ‘catastrophic failure’ in the connection.”

PISO is composed of a dozen ISPs, all of which are among the largest providers in the country. These include Pacific Internet, PHNet, Mosaic Communications, Philippines Online, Mindgate among others.

There are at least 170 smaller ISPs across the Philippines, according to a 2005 statistic from the National Telecommunications Commission.

I hope this would really solve the problem ASAP