Vietnamese internet service providers have confirmed that four out of five submarine internet cables connecting the country to the world are experiencing problems, severely affecting performance and reliability.
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| Illustrative image (Photo: vietnamnet) |
Two lines, the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) and the Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG), are currently completely offline, with the Asia Africa Europe 1 (AAE-1) line disrupting the Hong Kong hub, and the interior of Asia. (IA) a line cable is showing problems near the Singapore hub.
This is the first time that such incidents happened at the same time, and even more unfortunately, during the Lunar New Year holiday.
Many internet users have complained about slow and unreliable internet connections in recent years, ISPs said.
Acknowledging that this was an unfortunate ‘force majeure’, a representative of the Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) said that the provider was actively deploying measures to ensure international internet connections for its consumers, with their includes sharing data loads between international lines that are still available, working with Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, as well as optimizing traffic on various cables.
Thanks to these efforts, platforms such as Facebook, TikTok and YouTube can be accessed normally, and financial, banking and insurance transactions can still be carried out.
Mobile data connections are also ensured, according to the VNPT representative.
However, he highlighted that with four out of five submarine cables outages, access to the internet would suffer, particularly during ‘peak hours’ with data-intensive activities such as online games or watching on movies, etc.
Similarly, the military supplier Viettel has devised rerouting plans to regulate traffic on the sea cable and the remaining land cables, and to purchase additional emergency capacity to ensure the best quality of service for customers.
Major inland service providers are actively working with submarine cable systems and ship operators to determine the cause of the issues, the location of the incident and the repair plan, as soon as possible.
Other smaller providers such as CMC and NetNam are also taking steps to mitigate the consequences of the incident, such as pushing more traffic on terrestrial cables through China and Cambodia.
