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The Internet in China is operating at an agonizing slow speed. It reminds me of the early 90’s running CompuServe over a 14.4k modem… or maybe a 9.6k

But according to various twit’s coming in I am being told that the slow internet connection may be  due to cable break faults that occurred yesterday morning between China and Taiwan because of the typhoon.

@richardford said @sinotechian Getting reports from all over… seems to be related to the Taiwan submarine cable cut…

@xingyang said @sinotechian internet is slow asia-wide bc of the typhoon

@farewellcup said @sinotechian because the international cable has been broken by the earthquake in Taiwan.

Surprising I am not seeing more on the official media about this but just seems a few disgruntled expats complaining about MSN and foreign sites timing out or being increasingly slow to load. So looks like the VPN won’t even help me with access to YouTube or Facebook as the speed is so poor that I am having time to make a coffee while the page loads.

So I look forward to the fix coming soon and restoring the high speed broadband that I have come to expect….

UPDATE: (thanks to China Tech News)

According to information from China Unicom, due to the FNAL/RNAL cable breakdown caused by Typhoon Morakot last week, the Internet communication between China and other countries and regions such as the United States and Europe has been affected.

The FNAL/RNAL route is an important information channel in northern Asian areas. Because of Typhoon Morakot, the cable from Hong Kong to Taiwan was damaged on August 12. However, the communication was not affected because the protection routing was not interrupted at that time. Unfortunately, the protection routing of this cable near Pusan, South Korea, was damaged around 14:20 on August 17, leading to impacts of varying levels on China’s international communication to North America and Europe.

China Unicom is cooperating with relevant cable organizations and overseas partners to recover the communication systems as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, another Chinese telecom operator, China Telecom, also said it is engaged in the recovery of the FNAL cable used by the company. According to China Telecom, nine international cables in the southeastern waters of Taiwan have been damaged by Typhoon Morakot since August 9, 2009, including five used by China Telecom. These cables are used for communications with the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Because of the damages, the access to MSN Messenger and some websites will be difficult for at least a couple more days.