Vietnam's last functional undersea cable now malfunctioning

A section of the SMW3 cable connecting Vietnam with Singapore has encountered issues, according to the provider. This means that all five undersea cables responsible for Vietnam’s international Internet connections are now malfunctioning. Four other cables have been down since November and are still not working.

Among the four cables, the AAG and the APG cables lost all data, while the IA and the AAE-1 are only partially functional.

Internet service providers, however, said the new issues with the SMW-3 would not affect Vietnam’s Internet connection too much as it’s an old cable anyway and is not heavily utilized. Providers had also prepared to purchase more data beforehand the problem arose, they added.

"This incident would not impact the quality of Internet connection, as it’s an old cable that’s expected to be decommissioned soon," a representative of VNPT said. "We don’t use the data running on this cable for fixed broadband Internet services."