By Robert "Bob" Reyes
You may be wondering why “PLDT” has been trending for hours yesterday. It can be attributed to its social media post advising their clients that emergency maintenance will be conducted on the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) from September 26 to 30, 2020.
The Asia-America Gateway (AAG) is a 20,000-kilometer submarine cable that connects Southeast Asia with the United States of America across the Pacific Ocean, bypassing Guam and Hawaii. Among the owners (companies who funded the development) of this submarine communications cable system is PLDT.
The telecom giant, operating PLDT Home and Smart Communications, assured its client base that Internet services will remain operational during the course of the submarine cable emergency maintenance.
It may also be worth to note that aside from the AAG, PLDT is also connected to the following underwater communications cable systems (based on publicly available data):
- APCN-2 connected via the Batangas Cable Landing Station
- EAC-C2C connected via the Cavite Cable Landing Station
- AAG connected via the La Union Cable Landing Station
- ASE connected via the Daet Cable Landing Station
- JUPITER connected via the Daet Cable Landing Station
If you are a PLDT subscriber, I guess you don’t need to worry that much. All your ISP needs to do is to re-route Internet traffic away from the submarine communication cable system that will be under maintenance. Of course, Internet users from this ISP may experience some lag as cyberspace traffic may form some sort of bottleneck across the remaining gateways.
According to a social media post by SKYCable Thursday night, they, too will be affected by the emergency maintenance activities to be performed by AAG.
On the other hand, Converge ICT said on their social media post the AAG cable maintenance will not have any impact on their operations.