Vocus has confirmed that the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 3 (Sea-Me-We 3) submarine cable between Perth and Singapore is currently down.
The Sea-Me-We 3 submarine cable is down for the second time in four months, and customers can expect to experience increased latency to Asian destinations until the link is restored, the company says.
In August, Vocus confirmed the first incident of a break in the Sea-Me-We 3 cable, which went into service in 1999, between Perth and Singapore (see "Sea-Me-We 3 submarine cable suffers break"). The company recently confirmed the second incident, stating that there is currently a fault in the undersea cable approximately 1126 km from the cable landing station in Singapore, but did not elaborate on the cause of the break. In an incident summary, the company has indicated that a cable ship has been assigned for the repair operations, and it hopes to complete "tentatively scheduled" repairs by January 9, 2018. The date is subject to approval of permits.
Vocus, which backs the deployment of the Australia Singapore Cable, was in the process of building what press reports suggest is a replacement cable system for the network, the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) submarine cable, in August. At that time, its ASC submarine cable system deployment was ahead of schedule, and a delivery expected in July 2018 (see "Australia Singapore Cable deployment reportedly ahead of schedule").
In November, Australian data center provider Metronode announced that its Shenton Park facility had been chosen as the landing station for the new Vocus Australia Singapore Cable submarine cable (see "Metronode data center chosen to land submarine cable connecting Singapore to Perth"). The 4,600-km ASC undersea cable network will link Singapore and Australia (specifically, Perth), landing in Jakarta and Christmas Island along the way.
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