Not many details in this article, but further north there is another threat to undersea cables carrying Internet traffic:
On Feb. 2, a Chinese fishing vessel sailing close to the Matsu Islands severed one of the two cables, which connect the islands with Taiwan proper. Then, six days later, a Chinese freighter cut the second cable.
And they are spoofing their AIS data frequently. Now they control if they are where the AIS send information about, and use satellites to help with the location task (because they don’t trust the AIS from Russian ships).
Could probably be the same with other countries ships
I don't know it seems plausible to me that it was just an accident. There is plenty of legitimate Russian activity in that area. I'm no fisherman so someone correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think it is that unusual for them to go back and forth. It's not surprising that it happened to a vulnerable spot, because if it wasn't vulnerable the cable wouldn't have broke and no one would be looking into it. Finally the Russians have submarines they could use to cut the cable without being detected. Who runs a covert op with AIS on?
A lot of VN internet infra is yandex (Russia), so I don’t see them intentionally doing so. Especially since Russia has their attention elsewhere. There is a different player that would benefit however
No, they’re trying to get to Singapore. Business in Vietnam is highly dependent on things like Facebook and Google. I was there last year, and have some friends that run businesses there.
Does Svalbard really have a huge e-commerce sector or something that needs undersea fibre? They doubtlessly have plenty of satellite internet, so this will just limit their bandwidth and maybe interrupt things temporarily. What's the strategic value in cutting it?
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The SJC2 and the ADC are yet to be officially operational, while the SMW3 cable is outdated and about to be decommissioned.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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Whenever I read of an undersea cable breaking, I worry that the next world war has started. Seeing pipelines getting blown up for presumed geopolitical reasons hasn't reduced this anxiety.
I know these cables regularly break for ordinary reasons. And every time I hope it's just that.
Probably nothing will, but understand I have significant sympathy for younger folks who are getting their first real taste of zero-sum geopolitics and have nothing to compare it to for scale/threat level. For those of us that grew up in the 80s the days headlines represent a slow news day from our childhood.
70s in Italy were wild. Cities were cratered, blood was on the roads monthly in a triple underground war between brigate rosse, neofascisti and the state, with the cia meddling trough gladio. 90-10 were bliss in comparison. Wouldn't claim these are golden age because as the first world stabilized the unaligned world became the proxy for the great powers' wars, to all that it entailed. The proxies are getting nukes now, and so the struggle between great powers is shifting again...
What a fascinating bit of history I’ve never heard of. Thank you for introducing me to it. This whole story of the gladio operation only being discovered because of an Italian investigator trying to crack an unsolved case around far right terrorism feels like it should have had a block buster movie made already.[1][2]
If you’re not that young and didn’t try mediation yet you definitely should. It can drastically reduce anxiety of future events, even if it does not reduce “problems” when they happen.
Hah they can certainly afford to fund that delusion but I assure you if international logistics were to well and truly collapse they'd find out real fast the have-less native population in their bolt-hole country of choice 1. Aren't confused about where the canned goods are being hoarded 2. Are surprisingly adept at operating heavy equipment.
The super-wealthy think they can outrun any geopolitical shitstorm (up to and including WWIII) as is evidenced by the surge in luxury survival bunker construction in places like New Zealand.
Many nations DDoS each other all the time outside of scope of a war. I can imagine them breaking cables as a similar hostile action without an implication of war, especially if it's difficult to prove who's the culprit.
I've lived in Vietnam for the last five years and I read lots of reports like this. The local joke is always "sharks" biting the undersea cables, where the sharks are the Chinese I guess.
The reality doesn't match though, except for during huge storms there's rarely connection issues. The fastest speed five years ago was about 100mb, I now get 300mb for the same price. I'm still getting that speed right now (testing on speedtest.net to Singapore).
The joke was more that the VN govt was slowing down internet during holidays and blaming it on sharks... since that is when it always got slower... except that doesn't take into account that more people needed internet during holidays.
Nice to hear the speeds have increased over time. It was pretty bad when I was living there. That said, the 4G LTE coverage was amazing... literally the entire country, even in the most remote areas. Another reason to look forward to going back some day.
It's amazing what you can do when you don't need to apply for planning permission to put a 4g mast. They're everywhere - people rent out their rooftops to internet companies.
The blessing and curse of Vietnam: you can get away with nearly anything, but so can other people.
It's a beautiful country though and changing incredible fast, mostly for the better. There's a huge and somewhat successful anti corruption drive going on in high level government over the past few years.
If you've been away even for five years you'll see changes.
I spent 2016-2020 there and saw the rate of changes, even in that short time. I left literally right as covid started and wasn't able to go back.
> The blessing and curse of Vietnam: you can get away with nearly anything, but so can other people.
I quite enjoy the culture there... really opened my eyes quite a bit.
> There's a huge and somewhat successful anti corruption drive going on in high level government over the past few years.
I don't think that's something that is ever really going to change in my lifetime. There is corruption to the core, but I found that corruption isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, I'd much rather pay my "traffic ticket" on the street than deal with the bureaucracy of having to go to court and hope the officer doesn't show up. Choose your battles.
That kind of corruption (paying off cops) is absolutely toxic to economic development, just as much as the bigger scale corruption.
You never know if your competitor will just bribe a government official to cancel your license. Or the bank is corrupt and your funds disappear.
Its pervasive in Vietnam. During Covid government officials charged $10,000+ USD for repatriation flights. Funny thing is they did it to the wrong people and it got back to the government and several senior officials were charged. Covid tests were rife with corruption, and the Minister of Health got busted. Hell, Anti-corruption officials were caught taking bribes.
Until Vietnam effectively deals with corruption it will stall as a middle income country.
Singapore used to be like that and with independence the government clamped down hard and still do today.
I know people who work for the Singapore government and things like “can you call your friend at immigration and check on my visa?” are a big no-no. They arent even supposed to talk to other departments except for legitimate reasons.
A truck driver who gave $0.50-$1 to get to the front of the line at a factory to offload his truck was recently found guilty of bribery in Singapore. And so was the forklift operator ge gave the money to.
And as a result you can invest in Singapore and know your money wont be stolen by some crooked government worker. Its a safe haven in SE Asia unlike any other country.
> That kind of corruption (paying off cops) is absolutely toxic to economic development
You do realize that in order to get a cop job in Vietnam, you literally have to buy it? The corruption of 'paying cops off' actually happens much higher up.
Singapore went to the opposite extreme and not entirely in the right way. When I worked for Grab, it was run by a religious nutter who made really awful decisions and the company was full of nepotism. There are still plenty of ways to lose money there, it just happens in different ways.
> I'd much rather pay my "traffic ticket" on the street than deal with the bureaucracy
I'm not talking about low level corruption like that. That will change later, hopefully, once the wages of police increase.
I'm talking about high level corruption where a hospital is supposed to get built and instead the project gets stalled for years and then it turns out all the money mysteriously vanished. Or an entire minority village get kicked off their land to make way for a new resort, and a politician coincidentally gets a large cash gift. These are far more important to solve than police taking small bribes, and that's what they're working on now. I don't have enough insight or knowledge to comment on how successful they are likely to be but I wish them luck.
One point about the low level corruption, though: like you say, it's very convenient to pay a small bribe on the street to avoid a traffic ticket. Unless you make $150 a month and that small bribe is actually your day's wages and you can't eat that day. So yeah, it's convenient, if you're wealthy, and terrible if you're poor. Like so many things in life.
It isn't just central, it is the entire coastline.
> Unless you make $150 a month and that small bribe is actually your day's wages and you can't eat that day.
Oh totally. So many times I've seen them loading bikes onto trucks because people couldn't afford to pay. There is a lot of really f'cked up stuff there for sure.
I ended up just giving money away left and right, because I was lucky in that I could and it was the right thing to do. Nothing drives me nuts more than expats who complain about having to pay an extra 10k for something because the locals were 'ripping them off'...
> Nothing drives me nuts more than expats who complain about having to pay an extra 10k for something because the locals were 'ripping them off'...
Not all expats are rich. Many Vietnamese are rich. So yeah, it is kind of shitty that if you're a foreigner you'll be overcharged for everything all the time. It's racism, to put it bluntly, and not a good part of Vietnamese culture. I think it's totally reasonable to be annoyed about racism.
I am assuming the "SMW3 cable" mentioned is SEA-ME-WE 3, which was mentioned multiple times in "Mother Earth Mother Board" by Neal Stephenson (1996, Wired) [0]. It was noted as a competitor to FLAG, the cable Stephenson was mainly following.
Or maybe more accurately: they are not fine and have a lot of problems with their undersea cables, but assure us that losing this specific cable didn't make it any worse than it already is.
Based on a different article[1] and the submarine cable map [2][3][4]... Asia Africa Europe 1 (AAE-1) is currently broken between Vietnam and Hong Kong, but presumable is functional from Vietnam to the rest of the cable that travels west (landings in much of southern asia and a couple points in southern Europe). Intra Asia (IA) is broken between Vietnam and Singapore, but it also lands in Hong Kong and the Philipines. SMW3 lands in a lot of places, but is reported to be obsolete.
So, it seems Vietnam no longer has a direct fiber connection to Singapore, and has reduced capacity to Hong Kong. There will likely be some slowdown as Hong Kong and Singapore are both popular locations for data centers.
There's not really an easy fix. Traffic will flow over alternate paths, but repair boats need to go out and locate the ends of the broken cables, bring them up to the surface, splice them back together, and then let them sink again.
Terrestrial cabling tends not to get damaged by ships, and is a lot easier to locate for repairs, but it's hard to run it over mountains and through forests, and you can't run a terrestrial cable from Vietnam to Singapore or the United States.
This is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam state run news agency reporting on the annual Tet holiday internet "outage" caused by "cable failure" it has gotten better over the years. Instead of complete blackout they slow social down to a total crawl or dead, my guess is they do it to stop the ability for any kind of organized public uprising, protest or civil unrest.
It is normal in Vietnam to have nation wide internet blackouts leading up to some politically important moment, holidays or maneuver. The authorities always blame some upstream fault and there is silence from government on it (apart from injecting some press about undersea cable failure. One year they put an article about sharks developing a penchant for internet cables which is now the running joke), the expat forums in Vietnam have pretty frequent and humorous complaints about it.
My colleagues in Vietnam frequently get cut off for days and just laugh that the "shark ate cable again"
Vietnam cant be connected by only undersea cables, they have land borders with China, Laos and Cambodia, whilst *mostly third world countries their internet is doing just fine during these Vietnamese internet outages. Not far away is Singapore - an island, with an AWS, Azure and GCP regions and they do not have shark eating cable internet outages.
Shower(-ish) thought: such cables are lasting and obvious artefacts for the future. These cables will stay where they are for eons. These Starlink satellites are like dragonflies. Once they are no longer continuosly replenished by new launches, they will disappear.
You can lower the SNR to the point at which it's unusable.
A system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers doing C&C over a unaffected back channel would be roughly equivalent to "cutting an undersea cable", I believe.
>You can lower the SNR to the point at which it's unusable.
This would be the equivalent to blotting out an AM or FM radio channel by outputting white (or other) RF noise on a given frequency -- or frequency range.
>A system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers doing C&C over a unaffected back channel would be roughly equivalent to "cutting an undersea cable", I believe.
Roughly equivalent, yes...
100% exactly equivalent, well, maybe not...
I don't know if Starlink is capable of frequency hopping or not -- nor the range of frequencies it is permitted to hop around in if it is -- but, if, let's say (for the purpose of discussion) that the following things were true:
a) Starlink can and does frequency hop;
b) The range of frequencies that Starlink is permitted to frequency hop in was infinite (1 HZ - infinite HZ) -- not true obviously, but if that that was the case,
then:
>A system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers doing C&C over a unaffected back channel would be roughly equivalent to "cutting an undersea cable", I believe.
Yes -- but it would have to simultaneously broadcast white (or other) noise RF on all RF frequencies simultaneously -- and it would have to use a sh-tload of power to accomplish that.
The state-sanctioned jammers might have a lot of power to back them up -- but remember that the power of an RF signal falls away according to distance according to the inverse square law, that is, it does not fall off linearly, it falls off exponentially (like the light of an incandescent light bulb) -- so again, it would need one hell of a lot of power to block each and every Starlink (or other satellite) subscriber in a given country...
If Starlink only uses one set frequency -- then blocking would be a whole lot easier (no need to expend unnecessary power blocking multiple RF frequencies) -- so perhaps the "system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers doing C&C over a unaffected back channel" -- with enough power, could in fact work...
Which is much easier to generate/store on land than on space.
> RF signal falls away according to distance according to the inverse square law
On land, a state actor, operating on its own territory, could put jammers every 50 km, which is much closer to the receivers than satellites that orbit at 550 km. Even if the jammers transmitted at the same power as a Starlink sat, being 10x closer would mean jamming signal 100x stronger.
>being 10x closer would mean jamming signal 100x stronger.
At a specific frequency.
The effect is similar to how a nearer radio station at a given frequency -- will typically block out others that are at the same frequency, yet farther away...
But does a strong radio station nearby mean that all other radio stations at all other radio frequencies are simultaneously blocked?
No -- someone can simply turn the dial and tune in to a different radio frequency, and listen to another "unblocked" / "unjammed" station...
If Starlink frequency hops, that is, automatically changes its frequency if bands of the RF spectrum are blocked -- then it will be much more difficult for the state actor to block all of them at the same time -- especially if each individual Starlink subscriber could frequency hop with no pre-set pattern, that is, independent of all of the others...
> A system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers
I don't see how a system that likely would need to be larger that the Duga-1 "Russian Woodpecker" can be hidden, and the Duga-1 wasn't even particularly powerful enough at jamming radio stations - well, it was a over-the-horizon radar, not a jammer, but the power and size requirements for an actual effective jammer are still there.
Starlink is an access technology. The Tier 1 backbone providers of the Internet are still terrestrial which means terrestrial fiber and submarine cables. Starlink still has to buy transit from the people with fiber. I think Starlink purchases transit from GTT, Lumen, Zayo and buncg of others. A fiber cut could still impact Starlink. Think of what happens when your ISP goes down but the Wifi on your routers is still up. It's somewhat similar.
> You can’t sever a satellite link like you can with a cable.
What do you mean? China, Russia, India and the USA have anti-satellite weapons around if they really want, and "destroy everyone's stuff with a kessler syndrome collisional cascading" works very well when the USA is the one with the most to lose.
Ironically, very-low-Earth-orbit as used by Starlink (lifepan measured in single-digit years) means that collateral damage from a-sat weapons would likely be limited.
E.g., where Kessler Syndrome in even modestly-higher orbits would remain a problem for decades, at Starlink altitudes, most of the debris itself should de-orbit over a relatively short period of years.
That could actually increase likelihood of such attacks.
I used to live in Vietnam circa 2016, and the joke every other month when the internet went out was that some sharks ate the cable again. Seems those sharks are still eating good!
> However, Vietnamese service suppliers said the failures on the five cables will not have great impact on the speed of Internet connection between the country and the world.
> The SMW3 cable is outdated and going to be decommissioned, so it has not been used for fixed broadband Internet services, they explained, adding that the latest breakdown didn’t occur in the peak time, and they immediately carried out responding measures to reduce impact on the Internet speed.
Quoting from the article without further comment can also be quite annoying to those who did read the article, for whom this is then just a waste of time. It’s like, okay, that’s from the article, but what is your point?
When the headline is contradicted by the article then the relevant quite is relevant and valuable. It saves time. Not everybody reads the article, I'd say that it even is rare and that a lot, maybe even most people jump to the discussion immediately after reading the headline. Because of cases such as this one: When you quickly see the headline being contradicted.
Usually articles are a lot longer and they bury such info deep, so checking the comments first if its even worth clicking on the article is normal, given the huge number of sensationalized headlines coupled with the attempt of the article writers to keep readers on their page for as long as possible instead of coming to the point right away.
The reading behavior of many is optimized for sifting through a large number of submitted headlines without wasting too much time, not for maximum enjoyment of any single one of them. The (I think reasonable) assumption is that many, maybe most, even of the initially interesting sounding headlines turn out not to be worth reading.
Yes, but then please at least state your point why you are quoting this portion — preferably above the quote rather than below. Otherwise one can be left to wonder.
Even more surprised by editors who will knowingly mislead with the headline in order to force people to click through and get those sweet, sweet ad (or subscriber) dollars just to find out the “man bites dog” headline was a lie.
I have seen multiple instances where the url was a significantly less sensationalist title that was presumably the authors original headline but an editor decided they needed to get the clicks and modified the actual article headline. Very funny how laid bare it was.
I've noticed some sites start with a clickbait headline and then change it after a few hours to something less sensational. I originally thought that they were responding to criticism, but I've seen it enough now that it seems to be a pre-planned way to game SEO/Socials. You can use the wayback machine to check, and I've seen some big headlines get revised down 4+ times.
How would we read the article if people didn’t put it in the comments? What, by clicking the link? Unthinkable! Please remember this is hacker news, you’re not allowed to click the link /s
The first time this happened the official explanation was that the cable had been bitten by sharks. The Vietnamese loved this, so now every time the internet is slow we just say ‘sharks’.
Obligatory link to "Mother Earth Mother Board" by Neal Stephenson for anyone wanting a deep dive into the fascinating world/history of undersea telecommunications cables:
Internet infrastructure in Myanmar is still relatively underdeveloped, which is why it's slow. These cables are not heavily used for routing your traffic typically.
On Feb. 2, a Chinese fishing vessel sailing close to the Matsu Islands severed one of the two cables, which connect the islands with Taiwan proper. Then, six days later, a Chinese freighter cut the second cable.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/21/matsu-islands-internet-...