Telco consortium starts Asian submarine cable system project

CEBU, Philippines - A consortium of telecom companies across Asia has started the construction of the project that will link Brunei, China Mainland, Hong Kong, Philippines, Japan and Singapore, with options of extending to Indonesia and Thailand.

The South-East Asia Japan Cable System (SJC) was initially planned to be 8,300 km in length, linking five countries/territories.

The SJC consortium as awarded the supply contract for the new international submarine cable system to two companies. SJC’s length is now 8,900 km which could extend up to 10,700 km, linking up to eight countries/territories while supporting an initial design capacity of over 15 terabits per second.

The SJC consortium signed an agreement with TE SubCom (SubCom) and NEC Corporation (NEC) to supply and install the system based on their decades of combined experience, technology superiority and extensive record of on-time and on-budget project completions. The SJC system is expected to be ready for service in 2H-2013.

The SJC consortium is composed of Brunei International Gateway Sendirian Berhad (BIG), China Mobile, China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), China Telecom (Hong Kong) International Ltd. (CTHKI, an Affiliate of China Telecommunications Corporation), Donghwa Telecom Co., Ltd., Globe Telecom, Inc., Google SJC Bermuda Ltd. (a subsidiary of Google Inc.), KDDI Corporation, Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel), PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin), Telemedia Pacific Inc. (TPI), and TOT Public Co., Ltd. (TOT).

With the strength of the investors to the project, the SJC will bring more available bandwidth to Asia to support future applications and next-generation technologies. 

This project will incur about US$500 million, and Philippine telecom giant Globe Telecom will contribute about US$60 million, said Globe Telecom president and chief executive officer (CEO) Ernest Cu.

SJC executive committee sand and chairman Ooi Seng Keat said that SJC is carefully designed to serve as many direct circuits between the landing points/POPs and is routed nearer the Northern part of the Philippines, thereby avoiding an area that is frequently stricken by earthquakes.

“The SJC will enable members of the consortium to meet the growing demands of the region, not just for increased Internet usage, but bandwidth intensive applications such as Internet TV, games and enterprise data exchange,” said Ooi Seng Keat.

“We are very pleased to have the opportunity to participate in the deployment of the SJC system and anticipate that, once completed, SJC will have a significant and measurable impact on bandwidth, enhancing how the entire region interacts and communicates with the rest of the world,” said Mike Rieger, vice president of sales for SubCom.

“We thank each member of the SJC consortium for their trust and support and look forward to the completion of this landmark project utilizing SubCom’s state of the art advanced 40G SLTE and OADM Branching Units,” Rieger added. – (FREEMAN)