Undersea cable break disrupts Vietnam's Internet connection

The Asia-America Gateway (AAG) undersea cable has been damaged for the second time so far this year, slowing down the Internet connection from Vietnam to foreign web services despite dealing no impacts on domestic browsing speeds.

Vietnam suffers from constant undersea cable breaks.

The breakage was recorded at around 5.17am on April 23, according to the AAG cable operator, and has been initially located in the SH1 segment of the underwater cable linking Ho Chi Minh City and Hong Kong (China).

FPT Telecom Company – one of Vietnam’s leading Internet service providers – said it has used land cables to forward the interrupted AAG Internet traffic aiming to ensure its customers will be minimally affected by the incident.

This is the second AAG undersea cable break in 2015, following the first one on January 5 which took nearly three weeks to be fixed.

Two similar incidents were recorded in July and September, 2014, reducing Vietnam’s Internet bandwidth to Hong Kong and the United States by 40%.

The AAG Trans-Pacific underwater cable system stretches more than 20,000km and connects Southeast Asia via Guam and Hawaii with the US east coast.

(Source: nhandan.org.vn)