Authorities assume the cable was stolen.

Restoration of the line is expected to begin this Sunday and conclude by July 5.

The Asean Restorer will need nearly 100 km of new cable to replace the missing portion of the TVH cable off the coast of southern Vietnam.  Earlier, a government committee put the repair cost at some US$5.84 million.

TVH transmits data from Vietnam to Thailand and Hong Kong. Six foreign cables pass under Vietnamese waters and at least 32 km is missing from one of them - the ACPN cable operated by a Singaporean firm.

The Ministry of Posts and Telematics, the Ministry of Defense and of Public Security Thursday met to discuss measures to prevent such thefts.

Now, only one undersea cable – the SMW3 – connects Vietnam with the rest of the world. If this line is also stolen or broken, the country would be technologically isolated.

Scrapped or stolen?

The government in the southern province of Ba Ria Vung Tau issued a decree last year permitting soldiers and fishermen to haul up unused cables laid before 1975 to sell as scrap.

Amidst the scramble, several fisherman reported that they ‘mistook’ cables in use for unused ones.

Telematics officials previously said that the acts were thefts, not mistakes, as the cable was buried 1-2 m underneath the seabed.

The province withdrew the permission to salvage old cable and banned the activities altogether.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has instructed relevant agencies to draft regulations governing offshore scrap salvaging.

Bui Quoc Viet, director of the state giant Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group’s Postal Information Center, said no other nation in the world permitted its people to haul up unused cables for scrap because the income was minuscule compared to the risk of communication cut-off.

One kilogram of scrap cable fetches a mere VND7,000-VND15,000 (less than a dollar) while it had cost $13,000 to lay one kilometer of the TVH line in 1994.

Reported by Hoang Ly - Translated by A.N.O.N