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International internet connections in Vietnam are likely to remain slow for another three weeks with repair work to a major internet cable which broke off central Vietnam last week expected to take until July 14, a service provider said.
The source told Vietnam News Agency that repair work on the Asia Pacific Gateway won't start until July 3 and is expected to take 10 days. The cable should be fully reconnected by July 14, depending on the extent of the problem, said the representative.
The cable snapped on Tuesday afternoon about 125 kilometers off the coast of Da Nang.
Service providers such as Viettel and VNPT said they have prepared contingency routes to minimize downtime.
No announcement on the cause of the problem has been made.
The cable was officially launched on January 3, but was quickly hit by a technical problem that took two weeks to fix.
The cable cost $450 million and has a capacity of more than 54 Tbps, promising to double internet speeds in Vietnam and ease reliance on the notorious Asia America Gateway, which has ruptured or been shut down for maintenance on numerous occasions since 2011.
The new system took four years to build, and links Japan with Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
Nearly 49 million people in Vietnam, or more than half of the country’s population, are online.
