Converge’s subsea cables spare Filipinos from internet outage

MANILA, Philippines — Broadband provider Converge ICT Solutions Inc. found an immediate return on investment in its new subsea cable to Singapore when it spared subscribers from internet disruption over the weekend.

Converge CEO and co-founder Dennis Anthony Uy yesterday said the provider immediately brought back internet services when a submarine link to Singapore was cut last Friday.

Uy said Converge rerouted data traffic through its Bifrost Cable System, a project that goes to Guam, Indonesia, Singapore and the US through the Celebes Sea and Java Sea.

Bifrost extends for around 20,000 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean. It is designed to transmit data among parties by about 240 terabits per second, landing in the Philippines via Davao.

Apart from this, Uy said Converge relied on the Southeast Asia-Hainan-Hong Kong Express Cable System for redundancy. SEA-H2X lands in the country via La Union.

SEA-H2X crosses more than 6,000 kilometers of waters between China and Southeast Asia, with the capacity to transfer over 200 Tbps across China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

“We planned our investments in these international cable systems as early as five years ago precisely in anticipation of these incidents,” Uy said.

“Our investments in Bifrost, along with the SEA-H2X, allowed us to achieve international network redundancy that’s most important at a time like this,” he added.

Last week, the University of the Philippines Diliman Network Helpdesk flagged erratic access to its information pipelines. The desk attributed the downtime to a fiber cut in one of the submarine cables to Singapore, where its data are hosted.

Afterward, leading Philippine telcos PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom Inc. confirmed that they are also subscribed to the disrupted subsea cable. In response, they rerouted their data traffic to other lines, knowing that fiber cuts, especially underwater, take weeks to repair.

Subsea links like Bifrost act as passageways for data transmission between and among countries, so telcos invest on them to expedite internet traffic and strengthen infrastructure redundancy.

Mostly, telcos subscribe to submarine cables that plug into countries where tech giants host their data offices, such as Japan, Singapore and the US.