Internet crawls as another undersea cable encounters failure

A representative of an internet service provider said the problem occurred at 13:00 p.m. on November 29, but gave no information on a repair schedule. The cause of the new incident remains unknown.

This comes after the cable AAE-1 (Asia-Africa-Europe) endured faults on two branches (S1H3 and S1H5) in May, severely affecting the internet traffic from Vietnam to other international destinations. The S1H3 branch was fixed in late September, while the repair plan of S1H5 has been delayed more than three times.

As scheduled, the AAE-1 cable will be completely restored on December 5. So far, two out of five undersea cables connecting the country with the rest of the world have encountered problems, slowing down internet speeds nationwide.

The failure of the two cable systems has seriously affected the speed of the nation’s international internet connections, with users finding it difficult to access websites and network services which have servers based abroad.

There are five submarine fiber optic cables connecting Vietnam internationally, namely APG, IA, AAE-1, Asia-America Gateway (AAG), and Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (SMW-3).

There is also a smaller cable, called TVH, which is only 3,367 kilometres long, connecting Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong (China).

Besides the submarine cables, Vietnam also has several terrestrial cables; however, most of the country's internet traffic to the world is transmitted through the undersea system.