Viettel Networks, a subsidiary of military-owned telco Viettel, announced that the Vietnam-bound link of the Asia Direct Cable (ADC) is now live, more than doubling the country’s international bandwidth.
The 9,400-km ADC – which connects China, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – was declared ready for service in December 2024, with a design capacity of over 160 Tbps on eight fibre pairs.
According to VN Express International, the Vietnam segment sports 50 Tbps of international capacity, which is 125% more than existing capacity supplied by five other 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 in 2023.
A Viettel official told the news site that the telco has activated an “initial portion” of ADC’s capacity, which he said will “improve user experience and strengthen backup capacity in case of disruptions.”
The cable is owned by the ADC Consortium, which comprises China Telecom, China Unicom, National Telecom (NT), PLDT, Singtel, SoftBank, Tata Communications and Viettel. Viettel is the sole owner of the Vietnam segment, including the landing station in Quy Nhon. Viettel Networks will operate the link.
Vietnam is also slated to get even more international bandwidth in the next few months via the Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2), a club cable co-owned by state telco VNPT. SJC2 is currently scheduled to be ready for service in the second quarter of 2025.
The Vietnam government aims to to boost its international subsea cable capacity by 2030 by increasing 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.
