Three of Vietnam’s five international internet cables fail

Three out of five undersea cables connecting Vietnam with the world encountered problems as of June 15, slowing down the internet speed across the country, according to local internet service providers.

The Intra Asia (IA) cable had an incident on its S1 branch connecting to Singapore while problems on the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) have not been fixed yet.

The failure of the three cable systems has seriously affected the speed of Vietnam’s international internet connections, with internet users having found it difficult to access websites and network services with servers abroad.

Vietnamese internet service providers have rolled out various measures to ensure internet connections for users, including sharing traffic between internationally connected fiber optic lines and captalising on fiber optic cables on land.

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 Vietnam’s internet traffic to the world is transmitted through the undersea system. Vietnam Investment Review