Repair work on the broken international cable won't start until July 3 and will take at least 10 days to complete.

A man surfs the internet on his tablet at a café in Ha Noi. Photo by AFP

International internet connections in Viet Nam are likely to remain slow for another three weeks with repair work to a major internet cable which broke off central Viet Nam last week expected to take until July 14, a service provider said.

The source told Viet Nam News Agency that repair work on the Asia Pacific Gateway won't start until July 3 and is expected to take 10 days. The cable should be fully reconnected by July 14, depending on the extent of the problem, said the representative.

The cable snapped on Tuesday afternoon about 125 kilometers off the coast of Da Nang.

Service providers such as Viettel and VNPT said they have prepared contingency routes to minimise downtime.

No announcement on the cause of the problem has been made.

The cable was officially launched on January 3, but was quickly hit by a technical problem that took two weeks to fix.

The cable cost $450 million and has a capacity of more than 54 Tbps, promising to double internet speeds in Viet Nam and ease reliance on the notorious Asia America Gateway, which has ruptured or been shut down for maintenance on numerous occasions since 2011.

The new system took four years to build, and links Japan with Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Viet Nam.

Nearly 49 million people in Viet Nam, or more than half of the country’s population, are online.

(Source: VnExpress International)