Why scaling across Southeast Asia means pricing in the cable you never see
In the last week of August, Viettel’s network engineers were doing something most of their customers never saw. They were moving traffic in real time, pushing 800 gigabits per second onto one undersea cable, another 300 onto a second, then routing whatever was left over a terrestrial fibre line that runs through Laos into Singapore. […] The post Why scaling across Southeast Asia means pricing in…
In the last week of August, Viettel’s network engineers were performing an invisible task – moving massive amounts of data. They were redirecting 800 gigabits per second of traffic through one undersea cable, another 300 through a second, and the rest via a terrestrial fibre line through Laos into Singapore. Unbeknownst to most, four of Vietnam's eight international subsea cables had failed within days of each other, cutting roughly 30% of the country’s international bandwidth.
Most businesses in Vietnam didn’t even notice the total outage, but they did notice a slower, less reliable experience for weeks, with no end in sight. This is not just a Vietnam story; it’s a scaling story playing out across Southeast Asia. Operators treating international bandwidth like a utility, rather than a finite resource, face a hidden risk that can cripple their operations.
Vietnam connects to the world through eight main subsea cable systems, with most traffic passing through a few key hubs. Four failures simultaneously is unusual, but the real issue is the lack of diversification in physical routes. The same fault affects businesses at different levels – small e-commerce stores, SMEs with real-time inventory or payments, regional platforms, and national governments.
The cost structures vary, from personal annoyance to measurable hits to fulfilment times and support load, to engineering bills and customer communications about degraded service. The fix is coming, but it’s four years away, and already slipping. New subsea capacity is a long-term, capital-intensive commitment with no guarantee of timely completion.
For businesses with heavy Vietnam-Singapore data flows, treating international connectivity as a capital allocation decision, rather than an operating expense, is the solution. Multi-path architecture, real redundancy, and edge caching can keep core functions running locally when the international layer degrades. For businesses less exposed, regional operators with capacity or peering relationships can seize the opportunity while others are constrained.
The lesson for all businesses scaling across Southeast Asia is to plan for this structural weakness, not just the cable faults themselves.
Written by urgent.news from e27's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
This story
This is one outlet's version. Read the fullest account.
