This is an unprecedented event, said the Network Operations Center (NOC) who announced that repairs scheduled for three of the damaged cables could be extended until next April.
According to the plan, the interruption on the S6 line of the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) will be repaired between the 22nd and the 27th of March, while the repairs on the S9 line will be carried out between the 5th and the 9th of April. The ruptures in the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) connection, meanwhile, will be mended between March the 30th and the 4th of April.
The recovery of the 6,800 km-long (4225 miles) Intra-Asia cable is scheduled for mid-March, since the registration and authorization of the ships for the maintenance of the line is still in progress.
There is also a problem with the Asia-Africa-Euro 1 (AAE-1) cable near Hong Kong, China, but in that case the NOC is yet to announce a repair schedule, the VNA news agency reported.
All this means that the quality of the Internet connection between Vietnam and the world will improve only late in March, although this period could be extended until mid-April.
The only undersea cable still operating normally is Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe 3 (SMW-3), but this is an old low-capacity connection that does not contribute much to Vietnam’s Internet traffic to servers abroad.
Over the past decade, there have been around 10 incidents on submarine fiber optic cables each year.
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