Repairs to submarine cables bringing internet connectivity to Vietnam have been rescheduled.
It seems the repair work – on a number of international undersea cables – cannot be completed by the dates planned. It may not be until late next week before all of Vietnam’s internet connections with the world can be fully restored.
The completion dates vary, however. For example, branch S2 of Tata TGN-Intra Asia (IA) is unlikely to be mended before 9 February, well after the original scheduled date of 29 January. That said, work on branch S1 of the cable was finished on 31 January, according to an assurance given by IA to Vietnam’s internet service providers on 4 February.
The repair of the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) cable was also rescheduled from early February. It is now expected to be completed and coverage fully restored by 12 February instead of 3 February, as originally hoped.
The IA cable system, stretching 6,800km, connects Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Japan. With designed transmission speeds of 3.84 Tbps, it plays a major role in transferring data from Vietnam and other Asian destinations to America and Europe. The AAE-1 cable began service in July 2017. It is about 23,000km long.
This is the latest in a number of recent reports indicating that, whatever their enormous capacity benefits, undersea cables can bring some very specific challenges of their own. Recent disruptive cable breaks have included two of the six cable systems supplying internet connectivity to Pakistan, not to mention the SAT-3/WASC and WACS breaks in the Atlantic Ocean, which hit multiple territories, and damage to FALCON, which affected a number of Middle Eastern countries, but Yemen in particular.
