Your slow Internet just got worse: Several undersea cables damaged after typhoons in Southeast Asia

PHOTO: Pixabay
PHOTO: Pixabay

Just when you thought your Internet connection couldn’t get any worse, here comes some bad news.

According to a report from tech website Yugatech Friday night, undersea cables have been damaged by the onslaught of typhoons around Southeast Asia, which affected the country’s Internet service providers (ISPs).

Damaged cables include those of “Asia-American Gateway (AAG), TGA-Intra Asia (TGA-IA), and SEA-ME-WE3 (SMW3)”. Local internet providers Cheetah Mobile, Converge ICT Solutions, and PLDT have issued statements about the incident.

Converge ICT Solution’s statement reads:

Dear Customers,

Our international backbone providers are still finalizing the estimated time to repair the submarine cable cuts. It usually takes 4-6 weeks to fix issues of such nature. Restoration is still dependent on weather conditions, availability of cable ships and permits.

Consistent to our brand promise of providing you a better experience, we have activated several international links to mitigate latency and congestion problems. This is just a temporary solution to lessen the outage’s impact to our customers. Thank you for bearing with us.

Should you have other concerns, please do not hesitate to send us a private message.

PLDT’s statement reads:

We’re sorry to inform you that you may experience a slowdown of your PLDT Home broadband service, particularly during peak hours. This is due to cuts in the international cable systems serving PLDT. We are working with our overseas cable system partners to expedite the repair of these facilities and shall provide further updates. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Meanwhile, in a report by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, subscribers of Globe Telecom will not be affected by the damaged undersea cables.

In a statement published by the Inquirer, Globe’s senior vice president for corporate communication Yoly Crisanto said, “Globe has successfully rerouted its data traffic that goes through the affected cable systems, to its other subsea cable capacity routes. In so doing the multiple subsea cuts had no adverse impact to our enterprise clients and mobile and broadband customers. Our technical teams are closely monitoring the network to ensure voice, SMS and data services are operating at normal levels.”



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