New cut found on submarine cable system providing Internet connection to Vietnam
Monday, September 29, 2014, 15:32 GMT+7
The operator of an undersea cable system that provides Internet connectivity to Vietnam has found yet another break on the same cable section where a fracture is being repaired.
The new rupture was identified at a location 68km from Hong Kong’s coast, the company behind the AAG (Asia Gateway Pacific) submarine cable system said Monday.
The new break is only 4km away from the part of the section S1I that was snapped on September 15. S1I connects the Vietnamese coastal city of Vung Tau and Hong Kong.
The AAG operator said it will repair the second break immediately after finishing welding the first one.
On Friday, a cable layer, a type of deep-sea vessel used to lay underwater cables for telecommunications and electric power transmission, was dispatched to the location where the first cut was identified and has repaired the break since.
The welding process is expected to be completed around 9:00 pm on Monday (September 29). The ship will finish fixing the second fracture at 10:00 pm on Wednesday.
While Internet users in Vietnam was told that their Internet connection would return to normal on October 1, the schedule has been now extended by two days thanks to the newest break.
One hundred percent of Vietnam’s Internet traffic will have been restored by 7:00 am on October 3, according to the latest announcement from the operator. At 10:00 am the same day, the cable ship will be burying the cable back under the seabed. The repair task will officially finish at 12:00 pm on October 5.
This was the third time the cable had been cut since July 16.
Internet traffic in Vietnam is greatly affected whenever the AAG cable is ruptured as the AAG has the most capacity out of the four submarine Internet cables that provide connectivity to the Southeast Asian country, according to an official from FPT, a leading Vietnamese telecom firm.
The AAG is a 20,000-kilometer-long submarine communications cable system, connecting Southeast Asia with the U.S. mainland, across the Pacific Ocean via Guam and Hawaii.
The cable has encountered frequent breaks and outages since it was completed in late 2009.
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