Out of the three undersea internet cables that crashed in January, one still remains adrift. The repair work on the notorious Asia America Gateway (AAG) undersea cable system was completed on Thursday, quoting service provider CMC Telecom.
The same day, another service provider VNPT Telecom confirmed that the rupture-prone AAG is back up to 100 percent of its capacity, just in time before the Lunar New Year holiday.
In early January, the AAG and two other internet cables, the Intra Asia (IA) and the newly launched Asia Pacific Gateway (APG), all experienced problems and were subsequently shut down.
The APG was fully recovered on January 23 while the other is expected to be fixed by February 5.
The AAG is well known to internet users in Vietnam for its frequent ruptures, which even inspired internet memes blaming the issues on “sharks.”
In 2016 alone, it ruptured three times – in March, June and August – heavily affecting outbound traffic.
Vietnam has five submarine cable systems. The AAG was connected in November 2009 with a length of over 20,000 kilometers and a design capacity of 2 terabit/second, directly connecting Southeast Asia with America.
The latest addition is the recently broken and now fixed APG Submarine Cable. It began operations in late December and was officially launched on January 3. The cable cost $450 million and has a design capacity of more than 54 Tbps.
In addition to submarine cable systems, Vietnam has a land-based system with a capacity of 120 gigabit/second that goes through China, and there are plans to build another one.