The errors on two submarine cables AAG and AAE-1 are expected to be fixed on September 26 and November 14, respectively. (Illustrative image)

Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) is a 25,000km submarine cable from South East Asia to Europe across Egypt, connecting Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy and France.

The AAE-1 cable system is designed with 100Gbps technology, with a designed trunk capacity of more than 40 Tbps on 5 fiber pairs. It has been put into operation since July 2017, with the role of improving quality towards Europe and the Middle East as well as providing additional capacity and redundancy towards the connection direction to Hong Kong (China), Singapore.

On September 4 and September 7, errors were reported on two segments of the S1H branch. The incidents disrupted Internet connection capacity from Vietnam to Singapore and Europe. This is the second time this year that the AAE-1 cable has had problems. The first occurred on May 25, which was fixed on July 12.

Meanwhile, another error occurred on August 11 on the Asia America Gateway (AAG) submarine cable,which has not been fully restored, affecting Internet connection between Vietnam and Singapore. It is expected that the repair of the AAG cable line will be completed on September 26.

This is not the first time that errors have occurred on both submarine cables at the same time. However, this time the incidents happened at the beginning of the new school year, when millions of students are studying online under the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some users complained that their operations have been seriously affected due to poor Internet speed and network quality.

It is hoped that after the errors are fixed completely, Internet speed in Vietnam will improve.

Van Anh

Asia-Africa-Europe 1 undersea cable runs into problems, affecting VN internet connection

The Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) undersea fiber optic cable had a problem on the S1H section on September 4, affecting the internet connection from Vietnam to Singapore.