The operator Vocus announced in its outage notice at 06:36 UTC on November 11 that the marine repair of the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) is complete, with the system powered up again and operational and initial testing showing normal operation; the corresponding ticket was closed at 07:09 UTC. Counting from 06:12 UTC on September 4, when the fault was detected, this cable between Perth and Singapore was out for about 68 days. We reported on the outage in October in three cable faults around Singapore.
How the repair went
- September 4: Vocus detected the ASC fault, located in Indonesian waters; wavelength and Ethernet services between Perth and Singapore went down and internet traffic was rerouted over other paths. The ticket records the cause as a "suspected shunt fault".
- October 28: the repair vessel finished loading spare cable and equipment in Batam, Indonesia, and the Indonesian operating permits were secured. The plan was to repair another cable, Indigo West, first and then ASC, with the ASC marine work targeted for completion on November 11. In the meantime Vocus spread traffic over a layer 2 path through Jakarta and newly commissioned 100G capacity between Japan and Guam.
- November 4: the Indigo West repair was completed, later than planned; Vocus said it ran into complications during the repair. The vessel then sailed for the ASC fault site and arrived early the next morning. The repair required the whole ASC system to be powered down, so services still running on undamaged sections went offline too.
- November 6: the vessel had recovered one end of the damaged cable when a crew member needed urgent medical attention and the ship diverted to Jakarta. The recovered end was secured and buoyed off, with a guard vessel left to protect it. Vocus expected this to add 3 to 4 days to the schedule.
- November 9: the vessel returned to the site and resumed work; both ends of the damaged cable had been recovered and splicing began.
- November 11: the final joint was completed, the repaired section was laid back on the seabed and the system was re-energised. Vocus said this was its final scheduled update on the marine repair, and that remaining issues with individual services would be handled directly with affected customers.
What it means for routes toward Singapore
ASC links Perth and Singapore, so the traffic hit hardest was between Australia and Singapore. With Indigo West repaired on November 4 and ASC restored on November 11, both cables on this route are back. A powered cable does not mean routing returns to normal at once, though: Vocus says customer services are still being validated step by step, and other carriers need time to move traffic back. If your users are in Australia and your server is in Singapore, or the other way round, it is worth testing again now and keeping the results; the method is in how to test VPS latency and packet loss, and locating loss is covered in troubleshooting VPS packet loss. What a Singapore node suits is in our Singapore VPS guide, and current plans are on the Singapore node page.
What a 68-day repair tells you
Submarine cable repairs are measured in months. This time, waiting for a repair vessel, waiting for permits, queuing behind another cable and then a crew member's medical emergency each stretched the schedule, and the repair itself required the whole cable to be powered down for several more days. For a business the conclusion is the same as last time: latency depends on the path, and the same server can feel very different from different countries; when your users are spread across several countries, keeping at least one backup region you can switch to is more dependable than counting on any single route never failing.