Vietnam’s sluggish internet connection won’t be back to normal until after Tet.
In case you were traveling and/or living under a rock and didn’t hear: recently, three of Vietnam's most important undersea cables have all been experiencing issues, resulting in painfully slow internet connections throughout the country. The issue is especially severe for users of Viettel’s service, which depends on these cables more than its rival companies. The three malfunctioning submarine cables include the notoriously fragile Asia-America Gateway (AAG), the Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG) and the Intra-Asia cable (IA).
APG, a new internet connection that is supposedly twice as fast, was only put into use last December in an effort to reduce Vietnam’s reliance on the accident-prone AAG. However, less than two weeks after its launch, the cable has already suffered connectivity problems, which won't be resolved by January 23.
The AAG cable, on the other hand, started acting up on January 8. According to Tuoi Tre, it might take until January 29, the second day of Tet, before all repairs are finished.
Last but not least, the IA cable’s signal has been intermittent since January 10, but service providers haven’t yet announced an official repair schedule.
While none of this bodes well for internet users in the coming weeks, it seems that very recently Viettel’s connection has gradually returned to an acceptable speed – knock on wood – due to a few temporary solutions the company put forward. According to Zing, the state-owned Internet service provider said in a press release on January 15 that it has rented more capacity on some land-based cables to make up for the drop from their undersea counterparts.
Specifically, Viettel’s connection load now has an added 70 gigabytes per second through a China-Hong Kong cable, 30 gigabytes per second through an Indochina cable and 100 gigabytes per second through the APG.
[Photo via InnovationS-i]
