The New Subsea Cables RFS 2025 Series: Asia Link Cable (ALC)

Type of Cable System: Latest Generation Coherent Optics. 
Open Cable System: Yes, and possibly the first for Southeast Asia. 
Consortium Members: China Telecom, Singtel, Globe Telecom (Philippines), DITO (Philippines), Singtel, Malaysia Telecom, Global Transit, and UNN (Brunei). 
Construction Status: On schedule. 
Number of Fibre Pairs: 8. 
Estimated RFS: 3Q2025.
Day One Aggregate Throughput: 144 Tbps. 
Salient Features: Three digit terabit cable between Singapore, China, HK, Malaysia, Vietname, and Philippines. 

ALC connects Brunei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, and China. It is a 8 fibre pair system with minimum throughput per pair of 18 terabits per second. Hauwei Marine is building the system which should be ready for service 3Q2025. The project co-leads are Singtel and China Telecom. Hauwei's involvement will deter many foreign carriers from using the cable's transport services, but there are extensive commercial  ties and strong telecom traffic flows between Singapore, China, and Hong Kong that should sustain the project. It is interesting to note that ALC is an open cable system, which means each consortium member selects their own line termination gear. In general, there are two types of Southeast Asian cable projects, those going to the US and not touching China and vice versa. Singapore and Tokyo are the neutral telecom hubs unite these disparate networks (to the extent possible given China's Great Cyber Wall). Construction cost was $300 million USA. 

Reports in Vietnamese publications indicate that FPT Telecom, a Vietnam telco and ISP, will join the consortium and put $87 million into the project in exchange for a branch to Vietnam and capacity on the system. FPT competes against the two Vietnam incumbents, Vietel and VNPT. Subsea cable ownership is a big strategic advantage that will lower FPT's costs of connecting to Singapore and allow it to do more international peering and buy more transit from more competitive Tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane Electric and PCCW as opposed to its two larger rivals. 



Asia Link Cable is a 8 fibre pair subsea cable connecting HK, Singapore, China, Brunei, and the Phillippines RFS 3Q2025

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Burying Fibre Optic Subsea Cables In Shallow Waters: The How And Why

Image
It is standard practice to bury subsea cables in shallow waters. This generally means the ocean or sea lying above the continental shelf. The shelf is really just that part of the continent that is submerged under water during the warm periods between the earth's recurring ice ages. During interglacial periods like now the shelves remain submerged and during each ice age the shelves become dry land as the sea levels fall due to less precipitation. Precipitation declines as the earth becomes colder and water is locked up in snow, ice, and glaciers on dry land. Indeed, during the last ice age the oceans were about 130 meters lower than today's levels and the continental shelves were dry land. In general, the continental shelves range from 100 to 200 meters below the water surface. At the continental shelf's edge the depths plunge down a steep slope to the bottom of the ocean. The purpose of burying is to protect a fibre optic cable from its most ferocious predators and enemi
Read more

The Best Subsea Cable Across The English Channel: Scylla

Image
The English Channel has been a sore spot for the wholesale telecommunications industry. The key problem is the abundance of freight and fishing vessels. Ships are the number one global cause of subsea cable outages. They drop their anchors to come to a halt and also drag them to maintain stability in rough seas. For example, last autumn a Chinese freight ship called the New New Polar Bear dragged its anchor through the Baltic Sea knocking out a gas pipeline as well as the fibre optic cable attached to it. This Spring a Houthi missile hit the Rubymar cargo ship in the Red Sea; consequently, the crew abandoned ship. To do so, they dropped the anchor to halt the vessel so the crew could safely depart in the life boats. Afterwards, the Rubymar drifted 31 kilometers and its anchor severed 3 major subsea arteries of European/Asian traffic, namely the AAE1, EIG, and jointly owned Seacom/Tata cables. It took five months to get those three cables fixed due to the ongoing Houthi rebel conflict.
Read more

How To Calculate An IRU Price For a 100G Wavelength

The IRU price should reflect your forecast of future lease revenes. If the current MRC is high and prices have been stable and are expected to remain so, then the opportunity cost of selling an IRU is high. You are sacrificing a lot of lease revenue if you sell that capacity. In this case the upfront IRU price should equal the three year MRC multipled by 4 to 6 years. So if the three year Faster cable MRC is $17K, then 48x to 72x times that number is fair value. So 48*$17K=$816K. Plus a standard 4% annual fee to cover the wavelength's share of maintenance and operations.. So strong markets and tight capacity mean that leasing is more attractive than IRUs to the supplier. Vice versa, the buyers will be desperate to lower their long term costs via an IRU. In my example, $816K divided by 15 years equates to $4500 per month excluding O&M. Bad for the seller. Good for the buyer. That's why so many of you are looking for IRU capacity to resell to your clients, but finding few se
Read more