5 submarine fiber optic cables broken for nearly half a year and still not repaired

Since February, the submarine cable management units have released a repair schedule, expected to be partially completed in March. However, by mid-April, all five lines were still experiencing errors.

Explaining this issue, a representative of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Vietnam said that the process of repairing the international cable route faced many challenges, including obtaining permission from other countries to access the cable location. In addition, it is not impossible to rule out the possibility that after fixing the old problem, a new error is discovered, so the completion time is delayed.

The ISP said the earliest it could restore some routes is late April.

Routes of 5 submarine optical cables connecting to Vietnam. Graphics: Hoang Khanh

Vietnam has five active submarine cable lines and this is the first time all five lines have encountered problems. Of these, AAE-1 had a problem since November 24, causing the loss of all international connection capacity from Vietnam to Hong Kong. The APG and AAG lines had problems in December 2022 and January, the IA line had a problem at the end of January, while SMW-3 was in February.

These lines are all owned and managed by alliances, including many telecommunications companies in many different countries. Therefore, Vietnamese network operators cannot take the initiative in fixing them.

On February 9, the Ministry of Information and Communications directed network operators to open more fiber optic cable capacity on land, share and rescue international telecommunications and Internet traffic for each other. The unstable Internet situation has gradually been resolved, but according to many users, the Internet quality has not yet returned to normal.

At the briefing on April 7, Minister Nguyen Manh Hung also mentioned the situation of the five cable lines, emphasizing that the infrastructure of the digital economy cannot continue to be unstable and unsustainable as recently revealed. According to him, state management at the central and local levels and telecommunications enterprises will have to take responsibility for the quality and sustainability of the national digital infrastructure.

The Ministry of Information and Communications aims for Vietnam to have 10 submarine cable lines in the next two years, three of which will be owned by domestic enterprises to avoid dependence on alliances.

According to VnExpress