PLDT, 7 Asia Pacific telecommunication companies to build cable system

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) and seven other telecommunication companies in Asia Pacific will build an international undersea cable system to cater to the growing demand for bandwidth.

Called the Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG), the proposed undersea cable system will link Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Philippines, Taiwan, mainland China, Japan, and Korea.

PLDT’s partners for the project include Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan), China Telecom and China Unicorn (mainland China), KT Corp. (Korea), NTT Communications (Japan), Telekom Malaysia (Malaysia), and VNPT (Vietnam). They signed last Monday a memorandum of understanding to plan and develop a detailed project proposal.

PLDT said the cable system will provide additional capacity for growing bandwidth demand and an alternative, diverse routing within the region to avoid some of the areas most prone to seismic activities, which are hazardous to undersea cables.

The cable system will span about 8,000 kilometers and will use the latest Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing technologies with a minimum design capacity of four Terabit per second. It is expected to be ready for service by 2011.

“The planning and eventual implementation of the new APG project is timely due to the growing bandwidth demand of PLDT and the other proponents. It is also intended to meet the requirements for cable route diversity, protection, and to provide capacity to replace the retiring cables in the region,” Alejandro Caeg, PLDT first vice president for the International and Carrier Business Group, said in a statement.

Aside from APG, PLDT is also involved in the $550-million Asia-America Gateway (AAG) cable project, a 20,000-km long fiber optic cable network that will connect Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and the United States West Coast.

Of the said amount, PLDT said it would contribute $50 million.

The construction of AAG will enable the Philippines to become a hub for regional and trans-Pacific connectivity. At the same time, it will meet the expected growth in the country’s international bandwidth requirements to support broadband applications such as IP-based (Internet protocol) data, video, and other multimedia services.

AAG is a consortium of phone companies including local telcos Bayan Telecommunications Inc. and Eastern Telecommunications Philippines Inc., the government of Brunei Darussalam, and 14 other foreign firms.