|  HONG KONG--Several ships were on their way Thursday to repair regional telecommunications cables broken by an earthquake off southern Taiwan, but officials warned that it could take several more days before Internet access across much of Asia returned to normal.
Fixed-line and mobile international telephone connections were largely back on line, two days after the quake, with a magnitude of 6.7, struck the Luzon Strait, telecommunications companies and regulators in several countries said.
Property damage was limited, but six of seven undersea cable systems, accounting for 90 percent of telecommunications capacity of the region, broke "one by one" in the quake and its aftershocks, the Office of the Telecommunications Authority in Hong Kong said.
The cables link countries in North and Southeast Asia to one another and to North America, and the disruption has underscored the vulnerability of the telecommunications infrastructure that the fast-growing region depends on for commercial activity.
Banking services, particularly international transactions, were severely hampered Wednesday, but banks across the region reported that services had resumed Thursday after networks were configured to detour around the broken cables. International transactions at automated teller machines continued to be affected in some places, however, and access to international Web sites was spotty.
Two cable maintenance ships from Singapore and the Philippines were expected to arrive at the site of the broken cables on Tuesday, and three more were to depart soon, the Hong Kong telecommunications authority said.
Once they arrive, it could take five to seven days to carry out repairs.
A technician in Singapore said that the speed of the repair work would depend on how quickly the crews found the severed ends of the cables, some of which were broken in several places.
While undersea cables are occasionally damaged by ships' anchors or fishing nets, repairing them after an earthquake is likely to be much more complicated, he said. The severed ends may have been buried by landslides or washed far from their positions on the seabed, said the technician.
Most telecommunications companies were able to restore international voice calls Thursday by rerouting traffic to satellites and to cables unaffected by the earthquake.
The financial impact of the cutoff has been limited by the fact that many executives and traders are still away for the holidays. Markets were quiet and trading light.
"Business has dried up in the past week anyway, so there's not a lot of things people are doing anyway," said Joel Kim, a fund manager for ING Investment Management in Hong Kong.
Among the damaged cables were the 11,800-mile APCN-2, a $1.1 billion cable built in 2001 that links China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan; and the north Asian loop, a 24,200-mile cable stretching from South Korea around the Eurasian landmass to the Netherlands.
C2C, a $2 billion 10,500-mile cable built in 2002 that links China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan to the United States, was also damaged, as were two cables belonging to Flag Telecom, an around-the-world cable project that went public at the height of the dot-com boom and went broke in 2002. Flag, now reorganized under new ownership, said that it had already booked a repair vessel, and that fixing its cables could take up to three weeks.
The only major cable in the area that appears to have escaped trouble was the EAC, or East Asia Crossing, cable belonging to Asia Netcom, a subsidiary of China Netcom. The 12,100-mile cable connects China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan.
After at least a day of cutoffs, traders said that their Bloomberg financial information terminals were sputtering back to life. Bloomberg's rival financial information provider, Reuters, kept most of its systems running. Donald McCulloch, information technology director of Reuters in Singapore, said that was largely because the company houses its information in Singapore, but backs it up to a separate site in Hong Kong.
Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Group, a technology consultancy in San Jose, Calif., noted that the Internet system was global, "so when a large part of the world goes dark, companies that run on information take a huge hit."
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"Trading institutions, for example, can lose millions of dollars in a minute, so not being able to access information for hours or days can be catastrophic," he said.
Although access appears to have been restored across most of the region, Enderle predicted that the total bill for Asian telecommunications companies could rise into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
"They are now using secondary services that are generally slower and often more expensive," Enderle said, referring to backup cable lines and satellites. "But they are still having to sell the service for same price as before, so that eats into revenue."
The troubles this week also highlighted yet another risk.
Anil Talwar, vice president of services management in Singapore for DHL, the global logistics company, said that businesses typically think that having two service providers protects them. "The question is: If both of the links go down, what will you do?"
Donald Greenlees reported from Hong Kong and Wayne Arnold from Singapore. Choe Sang-Hun contributed from Seoul, South Korea, and Nicola Clark from Paris.
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