Australian internet users face more inter-Asia latency after the SEA-ME-WE3 subsea internet cable connecting Perth to Singapore was cut again, just six weeks after being repaired.
The new cut was identified in the early hours of Sunday morning AEST and there is currently no estimate for when it may be able to be repaired.
However, the location of the fault has been narrowed down to approximately 1126km from the cable landing station in Singapore.
ISPs that rely on the route for inter-Asia traffic have warned users to expect “increased latency and intermittent timeouts when attempting to browse to International destinations.”
Traffic to and from Asia may have to be re-routed via the United States once more.
Apart from being close to or at capacity, SEA-ME-WE3 suffers frequent cable breakages, due to storms or shipping traffic.
The cable has only been back online for six weeks after the last round of cuts, which took the cable offline for 50 days.
It similarly had major problems in both 2013 and 2015.
There is currently no redundancy on the Perth-Singapore subsea route, although this will change next year.
Two operators are in various stages of building new cables on the route. The frontrunner is the Vocus-owned Australia-Singapore Cable, which is due to be operational in mid-2018.
However, the Indigo cable - backed by a consortium of telco and OTT heavy-hitters - is also pushing ahead with its own project.
