PLDT Inc. said yesterday its communication and Internet services will not be disrupted despite emergency maintenance work on submarine cables over the next six days, starting Saturday, (26 September 2020) 8:00 AM to Wednesday, 30 September 2020 5:00 AM.

Asia-America Gateway (AAG), operator of the international trans-Pacific submarine cable system, has informed PLDT it is conducting emergency maintenance on AAG submarine cables in the waters of Hong Kong SAR.

"We wish to assure our customers of continued connectivity, as we have alternative cable systems to keep our services going during this maintenance period of AAG," the telco yesterday stated.

PLDT has been expanding and boosting the capacity of existing and new international submarine cable systems such as the Jupiter Cable and the Asia Direct Cable systems, to provide redundancy in situations like this.

Such investments are vital because bulk of internet content used by Filipinos comes from overseas.

PLDT assured customers that measures, such as traffic rerouting and local caching, are already in place to minimize this activity's impact.

Communication and internet services will remain available to PLDT and Smart subscribers.

Should there be internet traffic spike beyond the traffic of the past weeks, some slowing down in the busiest hours for traffic going to Asia may be experienced.

However, no service will be denied, PLDT assured.

Furthermore, internet traffic within the Philippines and to the US will not be affected.

#submarine cables

PLDT assures no disruption on 5-day submarine cable maintenance