Japanese internet spike
By Asha

On March 14, 2011, I had written an article on how the well designed Japanese internet structure had functioned very well after the devastating earthquake and the tsunami that followed.  (Article republished below).

Today (March 17), net monitoring company Comscore has quantified the spike in Japan’s internet traffic after the Tsunami

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Shortly after the earthquake in Japan happened at 2:47 PM JST on March 11, there was a large spike in traffic coming from both computer-based and mobile Internet users. Over the next two days, mobile Internet traffic continued to increase in volume relative to Internet traffic coming from computers.

Japan currently has the highest rate of mobile media consumption, with 75 percent of mobile users using connected media. In the wake of the disaster, with those who were stranded unable to use computers to get information or rely on landlines to communicate with loved ones, mobile media use in Japan saw an increase which deviates even from baseline weekend usage patterns.
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(Techgoss had published the following on March 14, 2011)

Japanese net unaffected
By Asha

The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan has brought great death and suffering to the country.  It is feared that tens of thousands of Japanese have died, two nuclear stations have been seriously damaged and tens of billions of dollars wiped from the economy.

But it seems that the internet in Japan was largely unaffected by the earthquake and tsunami.  Renesys, which specializes in providing global, real time insights into Internet operations, has reported on how the well designed Japanese internet survived quite well

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The 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan has had surprisingly limited impacts on the structure and routing dynamics of the regional Internet. Of roughly 6,000 Japanese network prefixes in the global routing table, only about 100 were temporarily withdrawn from service — and that number has actually decreased in the hours since the event. Other carriers around the region have reported congestion and drops in traffic due to follow-on effects of the quake, but most websites are up and operational, and the Internet is available to support critical communications.

In- and out-bound traffic at the Japan Internet Exchange dropped by some 25 gigabits per second after the quake .. and then climbed back to robust levels by the end of the day.

Traffic at the JPNAP also seems to be down by only about 10% over its historical rates from the last two weeks.

It's clear that Internet connectivity has survived this event better than anyone would have expected. The engineers who built Japan's Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth, as befits a critical gateway for global connectivity in and out of East Asia. At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.
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