Viettel Business Solutions, a subsidiary of Viettel Group, announced on Friday that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Singtel to collaborate on deploying the first subsea cable directly connecting Vietnam and Singapore.
Under the MoU, which was signed on Thursday, the Vietnam-Singapore Cable System (VTS) will be designed with eight fibre pairs using advanced WDM technology.
A joint statement released by Viettel Solutions and Singtel didn’t specify the capacity of the VTS Cable, but did say that when the cable becomes operational in the second quarter of 2027, it will add “hundreds of Tbps to Viettel's total international connectivity capacity”.
Viettel Solutions also said the cable aligns with the Vietnam government’s strategy to boost its international subsea cable capacity by 2030. Under that strategy, Vietnam aims to increase the number of international cables landing in Vietnam to at least 15, with a minimum total capacity of 334 Tbps. Of those cables, at least two should be Vietnam-owned and should connect directly to regional digital hubs.
Vietnam currently connects to five international subsea cables: Asia Pacific Gateway (APG), Asia-America Gateway (AAG), Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1), TGN-Intra Asia Cable System (TGN-IA) and SEA-ME-WE-3, all of which experienced outage problems last year.
Two other international subsea cables in the pipeline for Vietnam are the Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and the Asia Direct Cable (ADC), both of which are scheduled to be ready for service in the fourth quarter of this year. Both are club cables, with Viettel investing in the ADC, while VPNT is backing the SJC2.