Just over a year after series of incidents affected Vietnam’s international communications network, there have been some new issues: three of Vietnam's five undersea internet cables are reported to be down.
The outage was reported by state media over the weekend. It seems that the Intra Asia (IA) cable had an incident on its S1 branch connecting to Singapore, while there have also been problems on the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) that have not been fixed yet.
While it’s not clear how bad the failure of the three cable systems has been, it does seem to have 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.
Local news reports say Vietnamese internet service providers have rolled out various measures to ensure internet connections for users, including sharing traffic between internationally connected fibre optic lines and capitalising on fibre optic cables on land, though most of Vietnam's internet traffic to the world is transmitted through the undersea system.
There are five submarine fibre optic cables connecting Vietnam internationally: 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.
Reuters points out that undersea internet cable problems are not rare in Vietnam, which early last year saw all of its five cables disrupted for weeks.
Indeed, in February this year we reported that Vietnam had confirmed plans to invest in two to four more international telecommunications cables with a data capacity of 60 Tbps by 2025.
