Published: Tuesday November 10, 2009 MYT 11:32:00 AM
Updated: Tuesday November 10, 2009 MYT 11:33:01 AM

Submarine cable connecting M'sia and SEA to US ready

KUALA LUMPUR: The 20,000 km submarine cable network providing a direct connection between South East Asia and the United States, is ready to be activated, Telekom Malaysia said Tuesday.

It will start carrying commercial traffic as Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM), together with the consortium of Asia America Gateway (AAG) submarine cable network, has completed the comprehensive test requirement.

The AAG is designed to provide a capacity of up to two Terabits per second of data bandwidth.

It is also the first high-bandwidth optical-fibre submarine cable system to directly link South East Asia and the United States.

The cable system connects 10 locations in eight countries across the Asia Pacific Region and the United States - ibcluding Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, Hong Kong and the Philippines while landing in Guam, Hawaii and California, said TM in a statement.

The AAG also provides seamless interconnection for the above mentioned countries to other regions like Europe, Australia, Africa and other parts of Asia.

"This commercial rollout of AAG marks another milestone for TM in providing reliable, lower latency international connectivity to its global clients from around the world," said TM's executive vice president, Global Mohamad Rozaimy Abdul Rahman.

He said besides providing additional bandwidth capacity, the AAG submarine cable system is intended to become an alternative and a more secure link for traffic from the region to the USA.

"This low risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, which have previously damaged submarine cable systems, resulting in major disruptions to international internet links," he explained.

With an initial equipped capacity of 500 Gigabits per second, the submarine cable network is upgradeable using field tested Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, which enables it to provide upgradeable future transmission facilities that support internet and e-commerce traffic.

The cable network complements existing cable systems such as the Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN 2) and Japan-US Cable Network currently connecting to North America via North Asia. - Bernama

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