Repair of faulty undersea cable to begin in February

The Asia Pacific Gateway (APG), which links Vietnam with Hong Kong and Japan, has encountered technical problems since December 13 due to a ‘cable fault’ about 125 km from the Hong Kong landing station.

The representative of an Internet service provider in Vietnam said the traffic loss due to the impact of this disruption was estimated at 1 Terabyte (TB).

The operator of the APG cable has informed local internet service providers that repair work on the undersea cable will start February 2 and is expected to be completed on February 6.

Vietnamese internet users, therefore, would have to suffer sluggish access to international websites for over a month.

The APG cable has suffered technical problems four times so far this year, with the previous disruption happening in October. The cable resumed full service on November 27 after over a month of repair.

Vietnam, where more than 64 percent of the population is online, has six submarine cable systems, plus a 120 gigabit channel that runs overland through China.

The APG cable, officially launched in December 2016, is capable of providing bandwidths of up to 54 Tbps (Terabit per second). It runs for around 10,400 km, with connection points in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

As of January 2021, out of its population of over 96 million people, the number of internet users reached approximately 69 million, according to a global consumer survey by German data portal Statista.