Your Internet speed might have been creeping over the last week but it will get even slower as a days-long maintenance period is scheduled for this weekend for the submarine cable system that enables Vietnam to connect to overseas service.

The Asia-America Gateway (AAG) underwater system will enter a ten-day major maintenance phase on Sunday, a representative from a local Internet service provider told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

This will greatly slow down Internet speed for users in Vietnam when they access services hosted outside the country.

Internet speed in the Southeast Asian country has been unstable and extremely slow at some points since May 26, when what was said to be a glitch occurred to the AAG.

The operator behind the system, however, declined to officially address the issue, whereas some Vietnamese Internet service providers said the incident was fixed shortly after detected. But the speed has since remained at a snail’s pace.

Last week’s incident was the fourth to have occurred to the submarine cable system, which links Vietnam and the U.S., in the year to date, and the seventh since last year.

On April 23 part of the system suffered a rupture and it took as many as 20 days to be fixed, during which Internet users in Vietnam were left irked by the snail-like speed.

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.

Vietnam is connected to four international submarine Internet cable systems, namely the AAG, SMW3 (Southeast Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3), TVH (Thailand-Vietnam-Hong Kong), and IA (Intra Asia).

But Internet traffic in Vietnam is greatly affected whenever the AAG cable ruptures, as the system has the largest capacity out of the four.

VNPT, Viettel, and FPT are reportedly participating in a trans-Asia Pacific cable system project that will connect Asia with the U.S. and is scheduled to go online in 2016.

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