PLDT to customers: No 5-day ‘net outage

PLDT Inc. assured customers on Thursday they will continue to have connectivity even as one of its international submarine cable lines undergoes maintenance over the next five days.

In an advisory, the telco said it will reroute the traffic that usually passes through the Asia-america Gateway (AAG) to its other cable systems and employ local caching to ensure that its services will continue to run smoothly.

Wednesday night saw PLDT announcing that the operator of the AAG, of which PLDT is a member of, will undergo “emergency maintenance activities” in the waters of Hong Kong from September 26 to September 30.

The brief announcement caused customers to panic online, with the socialmedia accounts of PLDT receiving a good number of anxious queries from its subscribers, some of whom surmised there will be an Internet outage for five days.

Internet connectivity has become more crucial than ever during the Covid-19 pandemic, as companies are now implementing remote work arrangements and schools, distance learning.

“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,” the advisory read.

These measures, the advisory read, will allow PLDT and Smart to fully serve all customers at full capacity by using the spare and additional capacities on all other cable systems that support PLDT and Smart’s operations.

The largest Filipino telco currently has a network of 17 international cable systems, some of which will be retired in the next few years, as they have already maxed out their capacities.

“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. Such investments are vital because bulk of Internet content used by Filipinos comes from overseas,” the advisory read.

It noted, however, that if there will be a drastic increase in Internet usage in the next five days, compared to the usual traffic recorded in the past few weeks, there might be effects in the overall Internet experience of its users.

“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, but no service will be denied, and Internet traffic within the Philippines and to the US will not be impacted,” the advisory read.