Internet Back to Normal As Faulty Undersea Cable Fixed
By Nguyen Quy, VNExpress
June 8, 2019
The Internet has been fully restored in Vietnam after a fault in the Asia Pacific Gateway undersea cable system was fixed on Thursday.
An Internet service provider said on Friday repair of the gateway that links Vietnam with its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region has been completed after nearly two weeks.
On May 26 the fault was detected in a section about 132 kilometers off the central city of Da Nang, which slowed down international websites in Vietnam.
It was the fourth time the troublesome APG cable, installed in January 2017, had technical problems this year.
The cable, which cost $450 million and has a capacity of more than 54 Tbps (terabytes per second), runs 10,400 kilometers (6,460 miles) under the Pacific linking Japan with Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Vietnam has six submarine cable systems, plus a 120 gigabit channel that runs overland through China.
More than 50 million people in Vietnam, or over half the population, are online.
With a download speed of 6.72 megabytes per second, Vietnam was ranked 75th out of 199 countries and territories last year by M-Lab, a San Francisco-based provider of Internet performance data.