TM earlier today has announced that a recent preventive maintenance work on Asia-America Gateway (AAG) submarine cable network that took place since 17 April has now been completed. It was performed at the Segment 1I portion of the AAG which is located between Vung Tau in Vietnam and Lantau in Hong Kong.
Despite its location, the link still carries data for several other countries within the Southeast Asia region including Malaysia to Hong Kong and United States. Hence, it is rather natural that the maintenance work might caused some disruptions to Malaysian users.
This is especially to those that are accessing Internet services or browsing sites hosted in Hong Kong and United States even though TM has rerouted and optimized its international traffic to help minimize the impact. TM has previously stated that AAG provides Malaysians with the access to several well-known services such as Zoom video conference, Valve and Blizzard games as well as Jabber and WeChat.
However, it is not known if this maintenance work related to a recent cable fault incident that happened on the network earlier this month which affects the Internet users in Vietnam. In fact, some of us thought the AAG was the reason behind the disruptions on Malaysia’s international traffic a few weeks ago but the cause turned out to be the Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 instead.
Nevertheless, Malaysian users should no longer face any degradation in terms of experience when they access internet services that are based in US and Hong Kong now that the maintenance work on AAG has been completed. Then again, do take note that submarine cable fault is extremely hard to be predicted and happens more often than you think.
(Images: AAG // TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map // Hyun Shisheng via Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons license.)
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