Internet users in Viet Nam will hopefully be freed from annoyingly slow connection speeds, caused by a fracture in a submarine cable system last week, three days earlier than expected, as fair weather has allowed repair work to begin sooner, the cable operator said Tuesday.

A break in the Asia-America Gateway (AAG), which connects the Vietnamese coastal city of Vung Tau and Hong Kong, occurred at the S1I section, 64km from the latter’s coast, at 11:41 pm on September 15.

Repairs were expected to begin on September 29 and finish on October 6.

Young people are shown at Internet café in Ho Chi Minh City in this photo illustration.

But the work may be completed around 6:00 am on October 3, as weather conditions have improved and Hong Kong authorities have allowed the cable layer to enter its waters earlier than scheduled, the cable system operator said.

A cable layer, or cable ship, is a deep-sea vessel designed and used to lay underwater cables for telecommunications, electric power transmission, and other purposes.

The cable ship is slated to arrive at the location where the cutoff was identified at 5:00 pm this Friday, September 26, and will begin welding the break at 9:00 pm Sunday.

The welding process is expected to be completed around 1:00 am on October 1. By then, 100 percent of the Internet traffic will have been restored.

At 4:00 am the same day, the cable ship will bury the cable back under the seabed. The repair task will officially finish at 6:00 am on October 3.

The cable break has slowed Internet speeds in Viet Nam to a snail’s pace. This was the second time in two months the cable had been cut, after another break on July 16.

Nguyen Van Khoa, general director of FPT Telecom, a major Internet service provider in Vietnam, attributed the frequent fractures to the below-standard technical design of the cable system.

“Two years ago, part of the AAG that connects bordering areas between Malaysia and Singapore repeatedly broke, since it goes through overlapping maritime areas between the two countries,” Khoa told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper in an interview published Sunday.

Khoa explained further that the breaks might have occurred when the anchors of ships stopping in the said overlapping areas became stuck in the cable.

“The cable would be snapped when sailors raised the anchors and set sail,” he said.

Internet traffic in Viet Nam is greatly affected whenever the AAG cable is cut. This is because Viet Nam has only four submarine Internet cables, and the AAG has the most capacity, the FPT official said.

(Source: Tuoitrenews)