Internet cable cut may take two weeks to fix   Youths are pictured at an Internet café in Ho Chi Minh City in this photo illustration.Tuoi Tre Vietnamese Internet users may continue to suffer disruption or slowdown when connecting to international Internet services as the submarine cable system off Vung Tau coast cannot be fixed for another two weeks, a telecom official with knowledge on the matter said Monday. Many users began to be disconnected from international Internet when the Asia-America Gateway (AAG), an international undersea fiber optic cable system that links to Vung Tau, was cut off on December 20. The incident sent subscribers of four local Internet service providers, namely FPT Telecom, Viettel Telecom, VNPT, and SPT, to experience disruption or failure to access international services, including e-mail, website access, chatting and video calling. VNPT said 40 percent of its traffic to international services are affected. The service providers asserted that only access to international services are slowed down or disconnected, and they have deployed backup plans to maintain traffic quality for their subscribers. But some users say they are experiencing slow connections even with the domestic services. Two weeks to fix While the affected users are wondering when the service will be resumed, Lam Quoc Cuong, director of VNPT International, said they may not want to know the answer. “The system still cannot figure out the reason for the cut, and all we know so far is that the defect is some 278km off the coast of Vung Tau,” Cuong told Tuoi Tre. Cuong said the technical team that oversees the AAG cable system is responsible for repairing it, and Vietnamese service providers can only cooperate with that team rather than fixing the cut on their own. As far as time is concerned, he added, when the cut is fixed mainly depends on the deployment of technicians and equipment to the location where the cut is identified. “Speaking from my experience, it will take around two weeks at the soonest, while the normal time is three weeks,” he said. Cuong said the issue cannot be solved immediately; a procedure of identifying the problem and setting out repair plans must be followed. “Most importantly, we still do not know where the cable ship is and how long it will take for the ship to arrive in the location of the incident,” he admitted. The cable ship, or cable layer, is a deep-sea vessel designed and used to lay underwater cables for telecommunications or electric power transmission. The Asia-America Gateway is a 20,000 kilometer submarine communications cable system connecting South-East Asia with the US mainland across the Pacific Ocean via Guam and Hawaii. It has landing points in the US, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam. Development of the AAG cable system was funded at a cost of US$500 million by 19 partners. The cable has encountered frequent breaks and outages since it was put into use in late 2009. TUOITRENEWS