HANOI, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam will this month start commercially taping the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1), a 23,000-km submarine communications optic cable route, the fifth system of this kind the country has used so far, state-run Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) announced on Monday.
The AAE-1, whose construction started in 2014 to promote the broadband market across Asia, Africa and Europe, runs through some 19 countries with more than 20 points on land, the VNPT said, noting that the point in Vietnam is in Vung Tau city, southern Ba Ria Vung Tau province.
By the end of June, VNPT had gained total international bandwidth capacity of nearly 1,400 Gbps (Gigabits per second), up 38 percent against late last year.
Vietnam will in the next few months have additional 100 Gbps from three existing international submarine communications cable systems, namely APG, Faster and AAG, said the VNPT.
Vietnam signed up 9.9 million fixed broadband Internet subscribers in the first six months of this year, up 16.9 percent on-year, according to the country's General Statistics Office.
Meanwhile, the country made total telecommunications revenues of 189,500 billion Vietnamese dong (nearly 8.4 billion U.S. dollars), up 7 percent.
