Vietnam’s internet to crawl as repair work starts on infamous cable

Internet connections in Vietnam are expected to run at snail’s pace in the coming week as a major undersea cable will go under repair.

A local internet service provider said the Asia America Gateway (AAG) is being fixed and work will reach the part connected to Vietnam' southern beach town Vung Tau on Sunday. It is scheduled to finish on June 5.

The incident would affect all service providers in Vietnam, meaning that internet users will have to face the sluggish speed on international websites.

Several internet service providers are ready to reroute and transfer signals to other cables to minimize the impacts on users.

This is the second time the AAG encountered a technical problem this year, following a reset last January, and at least five similar incidents in 2017.

Connected in November 2009, the $560-million AAG handles more than 60 percent of the country’s international internet traffic. The system runs more than 20,000 kilometers (12,420 miles), connecting Southeast Asia and the U.S., passing through Brunei, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Vietnam currently has six submarine cable systems, as well as 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. However, the country still managed to trump six other countries in the region.

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