Demand for capacity has increased by 8 times in 4 years, including the common Internet connection and private channel (IPLC), such as large companies like Google, Facebook and Alibaba. The stable infrastructure and affordable price have created the foundation for the success of many web-scale businesses in Asia.

Along with the growth in both demand and capacity, there has been a sharp price reduction on the cost of intra-Asia submarine cables in recent years. The average price for 10Gbps capacity fell about 32% last year. The continuous investment of infrastructure has led to a significant increase in term of capacity for intra-Asia cables, currently at 211 Tbps. Only in 2014, 65 Tbps capacity was added.

By the end of 2015, Asia will have 150,000km of optical fiber with ithe total capital of more than 9 billion dollars.

However, adding extra capacity is not enough. As Asian enterprises are following business trends on the web, it has created a boom in traffic like streaming videos, using cloud computing, virtual network functions ... This is challenging the ability of service providers to increase both their speed and scalability. Along with the appearance of many data centers, the demand for subsea cables are becoming more and more sophisticated. Thus, operators should make investment in infrastructure their priority in order to create competitive advantage and increase profitability.

On average, current cable systems around the world are used with capacities of less than 20% of the maximum capacity of the whole system. Therefore, the network upgrade with the latest technology and devices could bring profits for operators. Asia is a dynamic market than ever before, with many start-up companies and new business concepts on web scale. Asian cities such as Singapore and Seoul are also leaders in developing smart cities. In the current context, anticipating new needs of the market is very difficult, the technology will need to be flexible and capable of high programming, to adapt quickly to the constant changes of environment.

In recent years, a large number of damaged subsea cables caused by both nature and manmade incidents have led to a wide-scale network outage and caused extensive regional damage economically. As discussed above, when businesses using Cloud services are growing, the large-scale of Internet disconnection would cause great impact. Thus, service providers need to invest in newest technology to preserve their capacity and build an effective network mesh to prevent any unwanted situations.

Viettel had soon realized this issue and in recent times, Viettel also undertook additional investment of new subsea cable as APG and AAE-1, is expected to officially put into operation in 2016 and 2017. With 2 new subsea cables, Viettel has increased the total number of international connection channels to number 5 including landlines, ensuring backup capacity in case of need.  Furthermore, AAE-1 is also the first subsea cable connecting to Europe through the Middle East with very large capacity.