Internet connections from Vietnam will totally be recovered on January 9 when a broken undersea cable is fixed, Vietnam News Agency reported on Sunday.

It quoted Nguyen Van Khoa, general director of FPT Telecom – one of the local telecos that exploit the troubled Asia America Gateway -- as saying that a ship will be sent to fix the cable’s broken section on January 1.

He said they expected the connections to be recovered on January 9, or about 20 days after the problem occured, but also said the repair could be delayed by bad climate conditions.

In the meantime, FPT Telecom has so far restored 70 percent of its affected bandwidth by buying bandwidth and using earth cables, according to Khoa.

Nguyen Hong Hai, vice director of Vietnam Data Communication Company under the Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Corporation (VNPT), said his company has also managed to restore about 60 percent of its bandwidth.

On December 20, the section of the 20,000-kilometer cable between Hong Kong and the southern beach town of Vung Tau broke, leaving international connections from Vietnam shaky.

Services like access to foreign websites and sending emails to addresses on foreign servers were difficult, while domestic services were unaffected.

The AAG cable is the only one connecting Southeast Asia with the US. It has landing stations in the continental US, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam.

The US$560 million cable was launched in April 2007 and was connected to Vung Tau in November 2009. It is exploited by four major local Internet providers, namely FPT Telecom, VNPT, Viettel, and SPT.

Since 2011, AAG has broken or gone under maintenance on several occasions, adversely affecting Internet connections.