Why are marine optical cables constantly breaking?

With the AAG submarine cable route, it must be acknowledged that during the construction process, the technical designer has not done standard, so the new breaking frequency is quite dense as at present.

Why are marine optical cables constantly breaking? Picture 1
Mr. Nguyen Van Khoa

That is the affirmation of Mr. Nguyen Van Khoa - General Director of FPT Telecom, one of four Vietnamese operators ( Viettel, FPT, VNPT, SPT ) and exploiting the AAG cable route.

Talking about the incident of the AAG fiber optic cable that is happening continuously, Mr. Khoa said: " Two years ago, the AAG fiber optic cable was continuously broken between the adjacent part of Malaysia and Singapore because this cable route went through the sea area. This is the overlapping sea area between the two countries. In this overlap, boats and ships between two countries are exchanging and exchanging goods regularly, in which many ships anchor or move when they forget to anchor. These anchors are actually inadvertently attached to the cable breaking . "

* How important is AAG in Vietnam's telecommunications connection?

Vietnam currently has a total of four submarine cable routes, of which the AAG is the largest and most recently invested, while the other lines ( SE-ME-WE-3, TVH ) are all aged. 10-15 years and low capacity. The IA cable route is newly built but is not as large as AAG.

Therefore, every occurrence of AAG will affect greatly to the general Internet speed of Vietnam. Users will see a slow speed of access. It is possible for AAG to be like our current highway 1, just one incident can make the North-South traffic significantly affected.

On the other hand, Vietnam has only joined the telecommunications market in recent years, so we only have four marine optical cable lines connecting to the world. Meanwhile, the long-established places such as Hong Kong and Japan . have had several cable routes several times.

Therefore, when disconnecting a cable with them is not affected, and for Vietnam, because it has not developed more cable routes and still depends heavily on the AAG route, so being affected is understandable.

* Some people think that this is a cheap cable route, low cost investment, not high quality so often suffer from incidents?

The investment in marine optical cable is extremely expensive and very complicated, there is no cheap story. Each cable route is the result of many network alliances of many countries.

When building a marine optical cable, the entire main cable route must be located in international waters. When entering any country's waters, the country will have the right to create a branch to connect to its territory.

The construction is extremely complicated, so there is absolutely no way the carriers will bring a poor quality cable to the sea floor and it will cost a lot of money for troubleshooting.

* Although Vietnamese carriers have a backup plan every time AAG happens, the Internet access speed of Vietnamese users is still severely reduced. Will this situation last longer?

FPT Telecom and perhaps all operators never want these incidents to happen continuously.

As for FPT Telecom, we are currently carrying out many other investment plans to minimize the dependence on AAG cables.

However, building a new cable is not easy. Firstly, the average time will take 3-5 years. Secondly, the marine optical cable will have to go through the waters of many countries and territories, creating complex construction.

FPT is currently participating in the APG (Asia Pacific Gateway) cable project with two other Vietnamese operators, Viettel and VNPT. According to the calendar, this cable was supposed to be put into operation at the end of 2014, but then it was delayed until 2016 to be put into operation.