$400m Asian cable to be built by SingTel, Google & partners

www.WirelessFederation.com/news: An agreement has been signed between Singtel, Google and six other companies, to build the $400 million Southeast Asia Japan Cable system (SJC). The 8,300-km cable runs between Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Japan. Potentially the worlds largest cable, it might be operational by the second quarter of 2012.

With a design capacity of 17 Tbps, the six-fiber pair cable can be upgraded to 23 Tbps. Apart from Singtel and Google, other members of the SJC consortium include Globe Telecom, Japan’s KDDI, the SingTel-Bharti JV Network i2i, Indian carrier Reliance Globalcom, Singapore-owned Telemedia Pacific and Indonesia’s Telkom.

According to Mark Chong, SingTel executive vice president for networks, as the SJC connects Singapore to other cable systems in Asia; it will provide access to other parts of the region and serve as an important cable diversity route. SJC is designed to avoid outage prone areas.