Brace yourself as Vietnam’s 2 internet cables will hit pause this weekend

Internet users in Vietnam should expect slow days ahead as one major submarine cable will be reestablished and another moved for airport construction during the weekend.

A service provider in Vietnam said that part of the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) in Singapore will be moved for expansion of Changi Airport over the weekend, while the Asia America Gateway (AAG) will be reset between Sunday and Tuesday.

The work has been planned well ahead and internet companies in Vietnam should already have prepared backup supply by now, the provider said.

But as AAG and APG are two major internet routes in Vietnam, there can still be hiccups with international connections in the coming days, it said.

The 'good news' is that many users in the internet-savvy Vietnam have been accustomed to once in a while sluggish connections.

The APG was launched in January last year and has broken at least twice. The new system was built in four years, running for 10,400 kilometers (6,460 miles) under the Pacific to link Japan with Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

It cost $450 million and has a design capacity of more than 54 Tbps, promising to double internet speeds in Vietnam and ease the reliance on the notorious AAG, which has broken or been shut down for maintenance on numerous occasions since 2011.

The 20,000-kilometer AAG encountered problems at least five times in 2017.

More than 50 million people in Vietnam, or over half of the country’s population, are online.

Vietnam currently has six submarine cable systems, plus a 120 gigabit channel that runs overland through China.

With a download speed of 5.46 megabytes per second, Vietnam’s internet speed was ranked 74th out of 189 countries and territories in a global survey of broadband speeds compiled by Cable.co.uk, a U.K. broadband, TV, phone and mobile provider, last August.

Vietnam’s average broadband speed was 10 times lower than its Southeast Asian neighbor Singapore, according to the survey.