Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) Submarine Cable System Under Maintenance

According to an online news portal in Vietnam, VnExpress, the APG cable is undergoing repairs and will affect Internet speeds in the region.By MalaysianWireless.com
March 15, 2019

According to an online news portal in Vietnam, VnExpress, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) is undergoing repairs and will affect Internet speeds in the region.

VnExpress reported, “Repair work on the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) off Malaysia, which encountered an outage late last month, is scheduled for completion on April 11, Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group said.”

APG is a partnership between China Mobile (China), China Telecom (China), China Unicom (China), Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan), Facebook, KT Corp (South Korea), LG Uplus (South Korea), NTT Communications (Japan), StarHub (Singapore), TIME dotCom (Global Transit, Malaysia) Viettel (Vietnam) and VNPT (Vietnam).

TIME’s wholly owned subsidiary Global Transit is currently administering the APG on behalf of the Group.

With a total length of 10,400 km, the APG network can deliver a capacity of more than 54 Tbps, design protected for 100 Gbps technology upgrades. The submarine cable system went live in late 2016.

“Several internet service providers have said they are ready to reroute and transfer signals to other cables to minimize the impacts on users. But it will take users longer to access websites or online services hosted outside the country during peak hours.” said VnExpress.

VnExpress said that the APG submarine cable system have broken down twice since going live.

Prior to this, on December 23, 2017, the Asia-Pacific Gataway (APG) submarine cable, branch from Vietnam to Singapore, has crashed, negatively affecting internet capacity of VNPT and other network operators.

On 27 February, 2019, HiNet (Chunghwa Telecom) in Taiwan posted the following:

“Due to APG cable outage (occurred at 21:32, February 27, 2019 (GMT+8)), HiNet customers might suffer from higher latency when connecting to Singapore during peak time only, while the other non-peak time will have no further impact after our emergency action. Will keep the latest announcement here once any update for the APG outage. We apologize for any inconvenience resulted from the event.”

At the moment, more than 50 million people in Vietnam are experiencing slow Internet connection to the rest world as the Intra Asia (IA) cable system, one two major internet routes in Vietnam, is also undergoing repair works.

For TIME dotCom fixed broadband users, there appear to be some routing issue affecting a certain customers recently however this appears to have been resolved.

A TIME dotCom spokesperson said that its broadband customers are not affected by the service disruption linking to the Asia-Pacific Gataway (APG).

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