Two repair ships will soon start fixing undersea cables damaged last week by an earthquake off Taiwan's coast that resulted in a major disruption to telephone and Internet links across Asia, the island's Chunghwa Telecom Co said yesterday. ¡¡

The two ships will take two to three weeks to complete their task, said Wu Chih-ming, a senior official at Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's largest telecommunications company. "The ships are expected to arrive in Taiwan today and tomorrow and will work at sea over the next two weeks," Wu said yesterday. ¡¡

Two more ships will join later, he said, without elaborating. Wu said one of the ships is Japanese registered and sailed to Taiwan from Japan. The other, British registered, sailed to Taiwan from the Philippines, he said. ¡¡¡¡

Both are specially equipped to repair undersea cables and had to complete other repair work before setting out for Taiwan.

The December 26 quake - measured at magnitude 6.7 by Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau and 7.1 by the United States Geological Survey - snapped undersea cables off Taiwan, cutting telecommunications across the region and leaving companies scrambling to reroute traffic through satellites and cables that were not damaged. Services were gradually restored in the days following the quake but have not fully recovered. ¡¡¡¡

In Hong Kong, Internet connections on the first working day of the new year were operating at 70 percent to 80 percent of normal levels yesterday, an official said. ¡¡¡¡

Internet connections in Hong Kong should be fully restored by mid-January, when repair work on the first of six damaged undersea cables serving the territory is expected to be complete. ¡¡