Customers of TPG Telecom in Australia are battling slow Internet services due to a major fiber fault in its international submarine cable.

TPG's fiber cable fault occurred over the weekend as the Internet service provider's Sydney-Guam submarine cable suffered a major setback.

On Friday, the cable which is operated by Pipe (TPG's subsidiary) went down per the fault notice posted by the operator.

The PPC-1 submarine cable line between Guam and Sydney is the one affected by the fault, which has taken down the 4,287 mile-long cable.

"At approximately 20:00:10 AEDT on Feb. 5, 2016, the TPG Network Operations Centre received multiple alarms for the PPC-1 cable system between Sydney and Guam," states the TPG notice. "The alarms indicated that a submarine line card had lost its payload. A Network Incident ticket was created and the issue was immediately escalated to the PPC-1 transmission engineering team."

The operator has revealed that the Transmission engineering team — in tandem with infrastructure vendors — has conducted preliminary investigations and found that a fiber fault existed nearly 2,852 miles from Guam.

Australian subscribers of the service will be facing slow Internet due to the unforeseen problem.

In the interim, the Australian-Japan Cable system and the Southern Cross Cable will be deployed to route traffic and used as substitutes said the TPG Telecom.

When Will The Issue Be Resolved?

The outage is expected to last a while and will not be fixed before March. Initially, it was anticipated that the outage will take a little over a month to be sorted — the repair date is said to be March 7 — but since repair crews are occupied with another job, it is not known when the fault will be resolved.

The maintenance ship that the TPG Telecom has a contract with to rectify the submarine cable faults is currently engaged in fixing the Basslink cable system, which is between contracted Victoria and Tasmania.

During the outage, TPG is routing traffic via Southern Cross and the Australian-Japan Cable system.

"TPG has started to work with our maintenance contractor to understand when we can mobilize a repair ship to the specific location. Due to the nature of the fault, resolution is expected to take an extended period," said the notice.

Meanwhile, Irate TPG customers have expressed their displeasure on the slow browsing speeds.

"Since Friday night, has anyone else been noticing very slow international Internet browsing? Often getting timeouts loading various web sites, or takes a very long time to load up," complained a user.

The issue sheds light on the dependency of the Internet systems in Australia on a few limited communication lines.