The cable was severed last Friday, preventing China Telecom and other Chinese Internet Service Providers (ISP) from connecting users to servers in North America, according to China Telecom.

Millions of Internet surfers received an extremely slow response or none at all when they visited websites in the United States over the weekend.

Japan has dispatched its technicians to repair the broken segment, which lies within the Yokohama maintenance zone of Japan.

The exact cause of the break is still under investigation.

Undersea cables are vulnerable to large fishing net and excavation machines working in the shallow sea, said China Telecom sources.

China Telecom is now trying to divert Web traffic through satellites and other channels.

But the contingency measures are still not expected to restore the Internet connection to the normal standard.

The international direct dialing service between China and the United States is not affected because the circuitry is not carried by the damaged cable.

But the service in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore have been affected, said a spokesman of US-based AT&T Company.

The spokesman said the crash is being most seriously felt in Singapore and China's Taiwan.

The cable is a major carrier of Internet data exchange between China and the United States, carrying 930 megabytes Internet circuitry of China Telecom and part of the Internet circuitry owned by China Unicom and China Netcom.

The undersea cable linking China and the United States was designed to be a circularity consisting of the north line and the south line, said sources in China Telecom.

The south line is unable to take the place of the broken north line because it is still under construction.

(China Daily 02/12/2001)