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

Breaking Story: Facebook Building Subsea Cable That Will Encompass The World

Image
Several sources have whispered in my ear that META is planning a new 16 fibre pair cable that will encompass the world going from the US East Coast to the US West Coast via the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The most ambitious subsea project ever undertaken. I do not know the exact routing. I know that the cable will launch from the American East Coast and will go down the West African Coast to South Africa and then head straight to Mumbai. It is not clear if Europe will be online or not. From Mumbai it will head straight to Australia and then up to the US West Coast. I speculate that there may be branching units to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But the basic routing is US/South Africa/India/Australia/US. What is not clear is if there will be branching units to add more countries to the cable.  This semi-secret cable reflects META's desire for network resiliency given the four month Red Sea down time that AAE-1 and other subsea cables suffered during the first half
Read more

Facebook's Semi-Secret W Cable

Image
 A few days ago I wrote that Facebook was planning a new subsea cable directly linking the US East Coast to South Africa, then up to India, onward to Australia, and finally to the US West Coast. Clearly resiliency is a big theme. It avoids Lisbon, Marseille, Egypt, the Red Sea, and Singapore. All choke points due to their telecom hub status. Note that the map below shows lots of branching units, but I don't have insider confirmation although they make perfect sense. The cable is 16 fibre pairs.  This cable may be heavily influenced by AI considerations. AI data centres require lots of space and power. The US, South Africa, India, and Australia are good candidates for AI data centres in terms of space. All of them except for South Africa have modern power grids. But South Africa is still the best place on the continent for large scale AI facilities. An AI theme makes particular sense given the cable's high latency. An AI data centre does not directly serve custom
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