PLDT allays concerns over 5-day emergency maintenance

MANILA, Philippines — Telecommunications and digital services provider PLDT Inc. has allayed customers’ concerns on their connectivity while emergency maintenance activities are undertaken on one of its international cable systems in the next four days.

PLDT in a statement yesterday assured its customers of continued connectivity, saying that the company has alternative cable systems to keep its services going during the maintenance of the Asia-America Gateway (AAG).

“PLDT has been investing substantially in 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 to ensure continuous service in situations like this,” the company said.

PLDT said such investments are vital because the bulk of internet content used by Filipinos comes from overseas.

PLDT said the operator of the AAG, an international trans-Pacific submarine cable system, has informed the company that emergency maintenance activities would be conducted on submarine cables in the waters of Hong Kong from 9 a.m. tomorrow up to 5 a.m. on Wednesday.

“PLDT assures its customers that measures, such as traffic rerouting and local caching, are already in place to minimize this activity’s impact, and to ensure that communication and internet services remain available to PLDT and Smart subscribers,” it said

By using the spare and additional capacities on all other cable systems that support PLDT and Smart’s operations, the telco said it would be able to serve all customers at full capacity during this period.

“Should there be an 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, but no service will be denied, and internet traffic within the Philippines and to the US will not be impacted,” PLDT said.

The AAG is a 20,000-kilometer long high-bandwidth fiber optic submarine cable system with stations in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Guam, Hawaii and the US.