A new submarine cable system in Southeast Asia is on the way after a consortium of telecommunication companies agreed to invest about US$300 million in Asia Link Cable (ALC).
The group is composed of China Telecom Global Limited (CTG) of China, Globe Telecom, Inc. (Globe) and DITO Telecommunity Corporation (DITO) of the Philippines, Singapore Telecommunications Limited (Singtel) of Singapore, and Unified National Networks (UNN) of Brunei Darussalam.
ALC will connect Hong Kong, China and Singapore as its trunk, with branches into the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam and Hainan, China. It will be approximately 6,000 kilometres in length.
HMN Technologies (HMN Tech) was chosen as the system supplier and is expected to complete the construction of ALC by the third quarter of 2025.
ALC aims to provide additional hypercapacity within Asia and boost resilience for international traffic. It will have a minimum eight fibre pairs in the system, with 18 Tbps/fibre pair minimum trunk design capacity, adding more capacity and diversity to existing networks in the region.
ALC Co-Chair, Mr Alan Tan (Singtel) says: "We started planning and designing the ALC cable more than two years ago at the onset of the pandemic, having anticipated the inevitable growth in high-definition content consumption, trade and innovation in this region.”
He continues: “Despite the challenges presented by safe management restrictions, we managed to come up with a system that will help meet the evolving needs of consumers and enterprises and boost local economies today and in the near future."
An open cable system architecture is to be adopted for ALC, enabling parties to select and maintain independent line terminal equipment that suits their customer requirement.
