Globe on track to complete Davao cable landing station

MANILA, Philippines – Globe Telecom Inc. is on track to complete its cable landing station in Davao which forms part of the $250-million Southeast Asia-US (SEA-US) submarine cable system being constructed to address the growing use of Internet services.

Globe chief commercial officer Albert de Larrazabal told reporters work on SEA-US submarine cable system is ongoing.

The company earlier said  the SEA-US submarine cable system was expected to be completed by the fourth quarter of the year.

The submarine cable project is being undertaken by Globe and other companies part of the SEA-US consortium such as PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin), RAM Telecom International, Hawaiian Telcom, Teleguam Holdings and Telkom USA.

The system will link the five areas and territories of Manado in Indonesia, Davao in Southern Philippines, Piti in the territory of Guam, as well as Honolulu (on the island of Oahu), Hawaii and Los Angeles, California in the US.

Covering approximately 15,000 kilometers in length, the system has been designed and engineered to avoid earthquake prone areas in East Asia.

The project is expected to provide initial 20 terabit per second capacity with state-of-the-art 100 gigabit per second technology to help meet the exponential growth in demand for bandwidth between Southeast Asia and North America.

“That provides us enough capacity for the foreseeable future. And then, we have, within the existing submarine cable consortium, the option to buy more capacity,” Larrazabal said.

Apart from the SEA-US submarine cable project, Globe is also involved in the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC) system which links Brunei, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines.

The upgrade being undertaken on the SJC to address continued rising demand for businesses and communications in the Asia-Pacific region, is expected to be completed by end-June this year.

Other members of the SJC consortium are Brunei International Gateway Sendirian Berhad, China Mobile International Ltd., China Telecommunications Corp., China Telecom Global Ltd., Donghwa Telecom Co. Ltd, Google, KDDI Corp., Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., and TOT Public Co. Ltd.