VietNamNet Bridge – The Asia-America Gateway cable linear reportedly broke on December 20, affecting 40 percent of Vietnam’s international traffic. Involved parties have said the problem would be fixed only after one month.

The accident with the sub-marine cable linear has affected international connections from Vietnam, making it difficult to access to foreign websites and send emails to addresses on foreign servers.

It is still unclear when the problem can be solved. Nguyen Van Hai, Director of VDC, the Vietnamese biggest Internet service provider, said on December 20 that it would take one week to fix the cable linear. Meanwhile, the representative of Viettel said technicians would take at least two weeks to fix the problem.

In the latest news, Vu The Binh, General Director of Netnam on December 22, affirmed that AAG would not be fixed after two weeks.

AAG got broken several times in the past and it always took much time to fix the problem. “It once took more than one month to fulfill the repair,” Binh said.

He explained that the repair does not depend on any Vietnamese units, but depends on many other factors, including the cable fault location, the readiness of the fleet and the weather conditions.

Regarding the statement by VDC about the period of one week needed to repair the cable, Binh said VDC might imply the time needed to recover the Internet traffic to ensure the same capacity as before the accident with standby systems. This did not mean that the cable could be fixed within one week.

Also according to Binh, AAG is the sub-marine cable linear that has met most accidents over the last five years. In some years, its accidents affected Internet connections for 2-3 months in total.

AAG is the cable system that attracts the highest number of users because it is cheaper than others.

Therefore, some experts think that in order to provide services at low fees and optimize the business, the service providers cut down some expenses on provision measures. This explains why it usually takes much time to boot the provision system.

To date, repairing AAG has been without the reach of Vietnamese Internet service providers. No one can say for sure the Internet connection interruptions would not occur in the future. Vietnamese Internet users have been warned that they may still suffer from the troubles.

Some analysts have commented that this is really a serious problem because it affects the national communication system. The analysts have called on the state management to sit down to discuss the problem.

Binh also warned that the consequences caused by the cable accident might be more serious as initially thought. The accident occurred on a weekend, when the demand for Internet connections was low. However, things would be different on Monday, when people come back to work.

“The accidents remind Vietnam to pay more attention to the national information infrastructure,” Binh commented.

Viettel said about 25-30 percent of its Internet capacity has been affected. Meanwhile, NetNam said 30 percent of its service capacity goes through AAG. For the time being, Internet service providers can only try to ease the consequences by using provisioned systems.

Buu Dien