APG Submarine Cable to Connect Malaysia to Korea and Japan

TIME dotCom Berhad has entered into a construction and maintenance agreement of the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) submarine cable system connecting Malaysia to Korea and Japan.

As part of the Group’s global bandwidth business strategy, TIME’s wholly owned subsidiaries and global bandwidth business arms, Global Transit Communication Sdn Bhd and Global Transit Limited, collectively known as Global Transit, will be administering the APG on behalf of the Group.

The APG is a 10,000 km international fibre optic cable system that will link Malaysia to Korea and Japan with seven branches to other Asian countries. The cable system is scheduled to be ready in quarter three of 2014.

APG is geographically well spread to bridge international capacity hubs such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea as well as connecting emerging markets such as Vietnam and China where demand for capacity is multiplying yearly. This effectively makes the APG the most strategic and widespread Asian cable system.

Saiful Husni, CEO of Global Transit said the Group’s investment in the APG cable system completes its ASEAN to USA connectivity route and solidifies the Group as a serious global telecommunication bandwidth provider.

“Combining TIME’s Malaysia-wide fibre network, Global Transit’s regional network nodes, ownership in the trans-pacific Unity cable, and now the APG system, the TIME Group has a complete land and sea fibre network footprint to capture the high-growth bandwidth demand in Asia.

“A advantage is that we have a global network system landing directly into Malaysia. This lowers our dependencies on Singapore as the main gateway for Internet traffic. We can now channel high volumes of this traffic on our network with the lowest latency, directly to the US.

“Given that the APG will be the most advanced Intra-Asia cable system between with landing points in strategic locations, we can be the most competitive bandwidth provider in the region. The Group will now be able to provide the complete Internet connectivity route on its own assets from Asia all the way to the United States.”

Demand for bandwidth from Indo-China and South East Asia is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 44%, from around 2,862 Gbps in 2011 to an expected 24,000 Gbps in five years.

Saiful adds, “We believe we have a good opportunity to grow our business as APG will provide the Group with an initial capacity of approximately 3,400 Gbps between Malaysia to Japan and Korea. The region is currently dependent on cable systems with limited capacity and upgrade options.”

By adopting a 40 giga-bit-per second (Gbps) optical transmission technology, the total design capacity of APG is at 54.8 Tera-bits per second. APG is design protected for 100 Gbps technology upgrades to meet dynamic traffic requirements in the future, giving TIME an opportunity to increase its capacity allocation as and when the needs arise.

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Subsea World News Staff , July 04, 2012;  Image: NEC