Vietnam’s lifeline to the Internet received huge blows as three of the country’s five undersea Internet cables ran into big problems. Internet service providers in the country stated that the extent of failures has caused the Internet speed to slow considerably.
One of those affected is the Intra Asia cable, which indicated an incident on its S1 branch that links to Singapore.
Meantime, both the Asia Pacific Gateway and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 cables also face unresolved problems.
The malfunction of the trio has, according to the official Vietnam News Agency, “significantly affected Vietnam’s internet connection with the world”.
These failures have led to an apparent feeling that Internet users find it increasingly challenging to access websites and network services located on foreign servers.
The three cables amount to a significant percentage of the country’s bandwidth, though it has not yet been determined whether the three are fully or partially offline.
Five undersea cables connect Vietnam to the global Internet, for a total combined capacity of nearly 62 Tbps, based on data provided by FPT, a Vietnamese leading Internet service provider.
The others, the Asia-America Gateway and the Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe, are currently operational.
A fourth one, which is minor, measuring 3,367 km in length, is the TVH cable, linking Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong.
Based on the current situation, Vietnamese Internet service providers are trying, by all means, to keep the Internet on for users by sharing traffic across internationally connected fiber optic lines and using land-based fiber optic cables.
But despite having several terrestrial cables, the undersea system transmits most of Vietnam’s internet traffic to the world.
And this is not the first experience of these natures felt by the country.All its five undersea cables were disrupted last year for several weeks.
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