Hacker News Reader

Comment by v8xi | Hacker News Reader

Article gives scant information but found this from 01/30/23: https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/internet-slows-to-a-crawl-...

From that article:

Vietnam is currently connected with seven undersea cables: SMW3, AAG, IA, APG, AAE-1, SJC2 and ADC. Besides the recent breakage of the IA, problems with the AAE, AAG and APG cables that have been present since 2022 and early 2023 have yet to be fully resolved.

The SJC2 and the ADC are yet to be officially operational, while the SMW3 cable is outdated and about to be decommissioned.

The fact that Vietnam currently only has one fully functional undersea cable has caused internet speeds between Vietnam and the rest of the world to slow to a crawl.

View on HN

I'm in central Vietnam now, speed is exactly the same as yesterday. 300mb/s. I tested on speedtest.net to a Singapore server. Ping is 58ms though, I don't know if that's gone up.

I often see this happen on HN where seemingly easy to verify claims made by parent and child comment directly contradict each other.

Often I think it’s tempting to take claims more generally than they are stated. Based on the information in the article speeds across Vietnam have indeed slowed to a crawl. We would like to interpret that as all outbound connections for anyone in any area of the country have all slowed down to a crawl and while that is the simplest and most direct take it’s not really the claim being made. Even the article does some work pointing out its not everyone, not all the time, and not all connections are equally impacted (e.g. one person switching to a wireless connection which was now working faster than their wired).

A day later and some friends have been frantically messaging about zoom calls and slack not working. Meanwhile I've tested several times with connections to Singapore, San Francisco, Berlin, and I get a steady 300mb/s every time, and slack is fine (didn't test zoom).

We live in the same town, within 5km of each other. So maybe it depends on the ISP?

In Vietnam now. The speed is slow but not as slow as a crawl. More like a swift jog.

Swift Jog allows Swift language input into your Apple Watch via swipe and type gestures on your Apple Watch while you’re on the move.

Only 3999£ on the App™® Store™®.

>> about to be decommissioned.

I presume this means disconnected and forgotten about on the sea floor. Or do they actually do anything to pull them up? I imagine pulling an old cable might be very difficult but I don't like things just being left for the sea to deal with. There is far to much trash on the seafloor already.

I would think pulling up a cable would be detrimental to any ecosystem that built on and around the cable. I would not be surprised to learn that ecosystems were affected negatively when the cables were laid, too, so I think we probably want to limit damage by letting them lie there.

Depends on what kinds of substances are present there, that will leach out over time.

Steel, rubber, and glass? Doesn't seem so bad.

Future archaeologists may find "the fossilised remains of continent spanning worms!".

There is no plastic in the cable?

If you are worried about plastic in the ocean I have some really bad news.

This attitude continues to perplex me. "There's already plastic in the ocean" is not a justification for adding more plastic to the ocean.

If you're optimizing for the minimum amount of plastic in the ocean, not building undersea cables is not going to be very effective.

You see, the question you're implying with that answer is different from the original one posed: from "do we put this cable down or not?" to "what else could we do with our time and energy?"

You're not wrong, but in the context of this conversation it is an incorrect assessment.

Typically they're just left there. But every once in a while someone will decide it makes sense to acquire the cable for cheap, pull it up, and re-use it somewhere else that doesn't have high bandwidth requirements but would still benefit from getting subsea connectivity. Seen this for Pacific and some Caribbean islands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com