Vietnam has confirmed that three out of the five subsea cables that connect the country are currently down.
Local service providers have been aware of the outages since June 15, with Internet speeds significantly down at present, according to state media-owned Vietnam News Agency.
The cable ship capacity crunch
Demand for cable continues to increase, but the fleet laying and maintaining them is small and aging
The three cables hit by the outages are the Intra Asia (IA) connection to Singapore, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) link, and the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) pipeline.
It means the only two subsea cables currently working in Vietnam are the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) and Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (SMW-3) cables.
The cause of the outages is not yet known, nor is the timeframe for when the repairs will be carried out.
Carrying out repairs to subsea cables can take weeks as repair cable ships are in short supply.
Last year, Vietnam suffered even more subsea cable woes when all five cables were down simultaneously.
It led the general secretary of the Vietnam Internet Association (VIA) Vu The Binh to call for more subsea cables to connect the country.
Earlier this year, Vietnam earmarked plans to invest in up to four more international telecommunications cables with a data capacity of 60 Tbps by next year. The country plans to have 15 cable systems in place by the end of the decade.
One such future cable is the proposed Vietnam-Singapore cable system (VTS), which is set to have a configuration of eight fiber pairs, landing in Vietnam, Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia.
The VTS cable is scheduled to be operational by Q2 in 2027 and will be the shortest cable to connect the two nations.
