Ordinary Gweilo

What exactly is the point of OFTA (the Office of the Telecommunications Authority)?

Today, they have confirmed that Internet acccess is back to normal in Hong Kong, more than 7 weeks after cables were severed during the earthquake in Taiwan.  You might think that they would have been monitoring the service from the major ISPs to see what progress was being made, or even perhaps chasing them up and putting pressure on them to get it fixed or offer refunds.  No, I don’t think so, either, and the press release admits that they are simply passing on information from the cable operators.  Well, thanks, but no thanks.

As I commented at the time a few days after the problem happened, OFTA didn’t seem to have much of an idea what was going on.  Their initial press release said that:

Because of the extent of the damages, the congestion is expected to continue for a few days. The operators are now taking emergency measures to maximize the throughput of the existing facilities and using alternative routings to pass the traffic through other directions.

A few days?   Then it was a couple of weeks, then the end of January, and then the middle of February.  It seems as if all they have done is repeat what they have been told by the companies involved.  Useless…

Talking of organizations that don’t have a clue reminds me that for the first few days of this ‘crisis’ the SCMP website had an incredibly smug announcement saying that access to their site remained normal.  Well, yes it was if you happened to be in Hong Kong, but doesn’t the SCMP like to think of itself as more than just a local paper for Hong Kong?

Eventually someone must have realized how stupidly parochial this looked to anyone trying to access their site from Europe or the States, and it was replaced with an apology to all their dozens of readers from abroad who found the site very slow.