PLDT joins group putting up cable system linking SEA to US

Telecommunications giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) has joined a consortium of major international telecommunications entities planning undersea cable system linking Southeast Asia with the United States.

Aside from PLDT, the other consortium members are AiTi (Brunei Darussalam), CAT Telecom (Thailand), REACH (Hong Kong), StarHub (Singapore), Telekom Malaysia (Malaysia) and VNPT (Vietnam).

The proposed undersea cable system will be called the Asia-America Gateway and will route between Malaysia and the US via Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii, with branches into Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam and Vietnam.

The Asia-America Gateway will provide much needed direct access and diverse routing between Southeast Asia and the US and will have advantages over the traditional trans-Pacific routes (via the North Pacific) in that it will avoid some of the areas most prone to seismic activity, conditions which are hazardous to undersea cables.

The cable system will span 20,000 kilometers and will use the latest Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technologies with a minimum design capacity of 1.28 terabits. It is planned to be ready for service in 2008.

"We are delighted with the signing of the MOU which marks the first step in the development of the proposed Asia-America Gateway. This cable system is designed to support the burgeoning demand for voice, IP/data and video traffic between Southeast Asia and the USA," said Teleam Malaysia’s group CEO Dato Abdul Wahid Omar.

The proposed cable system has the potential, as a gateway, to extend capacity to other locations in Northeast and Southeast Asia, India, Australia, Africa and Europe, as it is designed to provide a high degree of inter-connectivity with existing and planned high bandwidth systems.