Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
There was a fault in the Asia-America Gateway (AAG), a 20,000-kilometer long submarine communications cable system that connects Southeast Asia with the mainland of the United States, through Guam and Hawaii across the Pacific Ocean.
The cable was said to be officially broken around 12am on September 16th; this is according to Saigoneer who translated the report from Zing and FPT Telecom’s confirmation. However, anecdotally I’ve already experienced a severe slowdown a few hours before that on September 15th.
Connection degradation and high latency were experienced in Malaysia when accessing sites hosted in the US, North Asia, and even Europe. Folks using VPN connections will also be affected.
Telekom Malaysia has confirmed this issue a day later on September 17th, through its @TMCorp and @TMConnects Twitter accounts.
#TMAlerts 1/2 we are experiencing some degradation of data traffic to and from the US due to a fault on the AAG submarine cable system.
— Telekom Malaysia (@TMCorp) September 17, 2014
#TMAlerts 2/2 repairs are underway to repair a fault on the AAG submarine cable system. We will share updates as they become available
— Telekom Malaysia (@TMCorp) September 17, 2014
It officially issued a statement a day later on September 18th, stating that repairs to the submarine cable has been carried out. However in the statement itself, restoration works are only expected to start on Wednesday, October 1st, 2014, and is targeted to complete by Monday, October 6th.
#TMAlerts Restoration works to repair submarine cable fault underway > https://t.co/n6cmsV1DDR
— Telekom Malaysia (@TMCorp) September 18, 2014
The AAG undersea cable that was broken is somewhere along the section that connects Hong Kong and Vietnam. The exact location has to be first located before any repairs could be made, but the operations could be hampered by Typhoon Kalmaegi, though the storm has been dissipated since September 17th.
Telekom Malaysia are currently rerouting traffic however during peak hours, the internet connection will still be affected, especially when accessing sites hosted in the US. Downloads from services like iTunes, Play Store, and Steam, don’t seem to be affected, as they’re using content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute content locally. Curiously though, there were less slowdowns experienced on other service providers like Maxis, and TM’s Streamyx and UniFi seem to be affected the most.
Asia-America Gateway is long undersea fiber-optic cable that connects the US with Southeast Asian countries, namely Brunei, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. It was completed on November 10th, 2009, at a cost of US$500 million, by a consortium of 19 partners, including Telekom Malaysia. The cable has experienced frequent disruptions since it began its service, and the most recent occurred just two months ago on July 15th, 2014, though it was mended in ‘just’ 12 days. If this time around it will be fixed on October 6th as scheduled, it would have been broken for three weeks.
The post Asia-America Gateway undersea cable broken again; restoration expected to complete by October 6th appeared first on TechAttack.my.