The Asia-America Gateway (AAG) is a 20,000-kilometre (12,000 mi) long submarine communications cable system, connecting South-East Asia with the mainland of the United States, across the Pacific Ocean via Guam and Hawaii.
[3] Development of the AAG cable system was funded, at a cost of $500 million USD,[2] by 19 partners: AT&T (United States), BayanTel (Philippines), Bharti (India), BT Global Network Services (UK), CAT Telecom (Thailand), ETPI (Philippines), FPT Telecom (Vietnam), Authority for Info-Communications Technology Industry (Brunei Darussalam), Indosat (Indonesia), PLDT (Philippines), Saigon Postal Corporation (Vietnam), StarHub (Singapore), Ezecom/Telcotech (Cambodia), Telkom Indonesia (Indonesia), Telstra (Australia), Telekom Malaysia (Malaysia), Telecom New Zealand (New Zealand), Viettel (Vietnam), and the Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group.
Because the segment forms part of the cable's trunk, rather than a branch, internet services were disrupted throughout Southeast Asia.
[9] On July 15, 2014, the segment off the coast of Vung Tau was again damaged, and the internet bandwidth to international destinations was disrupted.
VNPT's Viet Nam Data Communications Company Deputy Director Nguyen Hong Hai, said that the time that it would take for repairing the cable had not yet been determined.
In early reports, the cable break was identified as being in the same area as the July 15 incident, off the Vietnamese shoreline near Vung Tau.
A representative of Vietnam's FPT Telecom said that this incident was most likely caused by anchors from local ships dragging along the shoreline, and blamed the cable's poor technical design as a factor in the repeated breaks.
[17] The snail-paced Internet speed users in Vietnam have been suffering since Thursday, 23 April 2015 is not brought about by a submarine cable cut as widely thought and it will take three weeks, or a month at worst, for repairs.
[19] On 2 August 2016 the AAG cable snapped again, about 90 km from the South Lantau landing station in Hong Kong.
Only 3 weeks after the repair, on 12 October 2017 it was reported AAG suffered from outage due to problems in parts near Hong Kong.
[26] Southeast Asia (mainly Indochina) had good Internet connections with North America restored for 2 weeks only, as the AAG cable section near Vietnam was ruptured for a fifth time in 2017 on 7 November.
This time - as the newspaper Việt Nam News reported - "at a cable branch from Ho Chi Minh City", which in fact is at the section off Vung Tau once again.
[28] The November-December outage of AAG cable will be an all-time record, surpassing the almost 7 week long breakdown earlier this year.
[31] Less than 2 weeks after the repair, another incident occurred: AAG connections from Southeast Asia were disrupted again on June 16, prompting the online newspaper VnExpress to make this headline: "Disaster-prone cable drags internet in Vietnam again".
PLDT advised its customers, as well as those of its subsidiary Smart Communications, that they may experience "degraded internet connectivity during peak hours" during the maintenance period.