KUALA LUMPUR, April 17 — Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) has taken proactive measures to optimise traffic on its networks, ahead of maintenance works by the consortium for Asia-America Gateway (AAG) submarine cable system, by diverting the traffic to alternative routes and other actions to minimise the impact to users.

The telecommunications company in a statement today said the maintenance works would take place between today and April 21 for submarine cable system at Segment 1i, between Vung Tau (Vietnam) to Lantau, Hong Kong, connecting Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Asia Pacific, including Malaysia to Hong Kong and the United States (US).

Following this, TM said the maintenance exercise might cause some degree of service degradation for Internet users of these services in Malaysia and the region, while for other users and services, the Internet experience was largely unaffected by this cable works.

“TM would like to reiterate that it has a vast and diverse network connectivity worldwide that is sufficient to continuously support any sudden spike in demand for Internet bandwidth.

“This has enabled us to ensure the functioning of our network infrastructure, having it always-on and available to customers to ensure seamless and uninterrupted connectivity,” it said, adding that the consortium needed to execute the preventive maintenance work to avoid any potential future breakdown.

AAG provides international connectivity to some Internet-based services such as video conferencing including Zoom, gaming that rides on Valve (Roblox and Blizzard), Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Instant Messaging (Jabber and Wechat), as well as any applications (apps) hosted in Hong Kong and the US.

Meanwhile, TM also highlighted that the Movement Control Order (MCO), which caused most people currently confined at home, had resulted in more than 30 per cent increase in usage trending.

“Of this, the increase of international link traffic was only five per cent, hence, TM network is still capable of serving popular apps or content with acceptable user experience,” it said.

TM’s existing partnerships with the world’s technology giants and social networks in localising Internet content has also resulted in only 20 per cent of Internet traffic going truly international mainly for streaming, online games and tele-conferencing, and this resulted in minimal impact from any cable fault or works to Internet users in Malaysia.