The Asia-America Gateway (AAG), an international undersea fiber optic cable system that broke off the coast of Vung Tau on December 20, will go back into service on January 9, two Vietnamese Internet service providers announced Sunday.

A cable layer, a deep-sea vessel designed and used to lay underwater cables for telecommunication, has left Singapore for the location of the incident, some 278km off the coast of Vung Tau and 120m below the sea, to fix the defect, according to Lam Quoc Cuong, director of VNPI International.

The cut has caused slowdown or disruption for many using the Internet in Vietnam over the last ten days.

FPT Telecom said it has managed to make up for 70 percent of the traffic affected by the cut.

The December 20 incident caused subscribers of four local Internet service providers, namely FPT Telecom, Viettel Telecom, VNPT, and SPT, to experience disruption or failure to access international services, including e-mail, websites, and chat and video services.

The Asia-America Gateway is a 20,000 kilometer submarine communications cable system connecting South-East Asia with the US mainland across the Pacific Ocean via Guam and Hawaii.

It has landing points in the US, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, and Vietnam. Development of the AAG cable system was funded at a cost of US$500 million by 19 partners.

The cable has encountered frequent breaks and outages since it was first put into use in late 2009.