The operator of the Asia America Gateway (AAG) has notified local service providers that repairs on the disaster-prone cable will be completed in a week.

On May 14, the cable’s branch connecting Vietnam and Hong Kong experienced a technical problem, which has affected international bandwidths connected to Vietnam. The branch is around 107 kilometers off the beach town of Vung Tau in southern Vietnam.

Vietnam has six submarine cable systems and a 120 gigabit channel that runs overland through China.

Connected in November 2009, the $560-million AAG handles more than 60 percent of the country’s international Internet traffic. The cable runs more than 20,000 kilometers (12,420 miles), connecting Southeast Asia with the U.S., passing through Brunei, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

But it has experienced frequent ruptures and repairs, affecting services in Vietnam, where more than 64 percent of the population is online.

Last month, a technical problem in the cable took three weeks to repair, also affecting millions of Internet users in Vietnam.

A report released this month by OpenSignal, a British company which measures mobile user experience globally, says Vietnam’s 4G average download speed clocked at 20.6 Mbps, among the fastest in Southeast Asian countries.