SINGAPORE: A high-performance submarine cable will soon provide additional bandwidth between Southeast and North Asia, Singtel said on Thursday (Mar 15).
The telco and the members of the Southeast Asia-Japan 2 consortium (SJC2) signed an agreement with NEC Corporation on Thursday to build the cable connecting Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, South Korea and Japan.
The new cable will support the requirements of “advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things, robotics, data analytics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality applications”, it said in its media release.
Singtel said the 10,500km submarine cable will link eleven cable landing stations in the region and is expected to be completed by the fourth quarter of 2020.
It will also feature up to eight pairs of high capacity optical fibre with a total capacity of 144 terabits per second, roughly the equivalent of simultaneously streaming 5.76 million ultra-high definition videos every second.
The SJC2 cable will be built and operated by a global consortium comprising telecommunications and technology companies, including China Mobile International, Chunghwa Telecom, Chuan Wei, Facebook, KDDI, Singtel, SK Broadband and VNPT.
A graphic depicting the SJC2 submarine cable route map. (Image: Singtel)
“The construction of SJC2 cable is timely and will provide additional bandwidth between Southeast and North Asia, whose combined population of more than two billion are driving demand for data as their economies undergo digital transformation,” said Mr Ooi Seng Keat, vice-president of carrier services at Singtel.
In April 2017, Singtel and its partners announced the construction of the9,000km INDIGO submarine cable connecting Singapore to Perth and Sydney, Australia.
In December 2016, Singtel and a consortium of 17 global partners also completed the 20,000km Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 5 cable.
