Vietnam confirms outage of three subsea cables, slowing internet speeds

Local service providers have reportedly been aware of the outages since June 15.

The cables affected by the outages are the Intra Asia (IA) connection to Singapore, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) link, and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) pipeline.

This leaves Vietnam with only two functioning subsea cables: the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) and the South-East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (SEA-ME-WE-3) cables.

The cause of the outages is currently unknown, and there is no estimated timeframe for repairs. Repairing subsea cables can take weeks due to the limited availability of repair cable ships.

Early last year, all five of Vietnam’s submarine cables experienced simultaneous outages. The cause remains unclear, but the country managed to sustain most of its connectivity through terrestrial networks, highlighting the importance of diversified connectivity routes.

Notably, in February, Vietnam revealed plans to invest in up to four additional international telecommunications cables with a data capacity of 60 Tbps by 2025. If the five existing cables are fully operational by the 2025 deadline, the country’s undersea bandwidth will nearly double to 122 Tbps. Telecom Review Asia