Living With Disconnections

Since the day powerful earthquakes off the coast of Taiwan damaged undersea cables (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2) and disrupted telephone and Internet access in Asia last week , we all in Malaysia and neighboring regions were first experiencing complete disconnection to sites hosted overseas, and lately though the connection is improved, but still, I’m living with countless disconnections to Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger.

The impact is significant, and I see decreasing number of online users in my IM contact list. Though I’m getting frustrated clicking on the Sign In or Reconnect Now button whenever the max auto reconnect attempts exceeded, but no choice, I still have to do it from time to time, as IM is one of the main communication mediums adopted by colleagues and friends.

This is the time it shows how important IM is, to us haha. Techxii, one of my all time favorite tech blog, has a very good article on the comparison between Skype and MSN, and how they are differing in terms of login technology. Definitely worth a read, if you can read Chinese ;)

Luckily I can still access to most of the frequently visited tech sites and blogs, or my days gonna be gloomy.

Workgroup collaboration within my workplace is not affected, as we’re all collaboratively tied together with our flagship product, the knowledge portal. Furthermore, the portal is hosted internally. Content repository, messaging, project management, scheduler, contacts, helpdesk, customer relationship management, sales force automation, and the list goes on and on… we have them all hosted internally. Can’t imagine what will happen to the collaboration structure, if the business solutions we’re using day in day out are depending on oversea ASP (Application Service Provider) applications.

Overall, Google’s web applications such as the web search, Gmail and Adsense are pretty well performing throughout the window of this internet connection interruption. Though I experience slow loading of Gmail in the first 2 days of the disaster, but still, they are all accessible. I’ve never seen my Google Talk disconnected as well. If you’ve never read about my previous post titled Google Web Search is Powered by More than 15000 Computers, go and have a look now for some interesting insights.