Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) - An Underappreciated Cable

The six fibre pair APG subsea cable went live October 28, 2016 with initial design capacity of 54.8 Tbps using standard high performance coherent optics. NEC was the system supplier. Consortium members include China Unicom, China Telecom, China Mobile, Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan PTT), Telekom Malaysia, Korea Telecom (PTT), NTT Communications, Facebook, and a few others. Because APG was designed as a 100G backbone, I believe the cable's ultimate capacity will be at least 75 Tbps. 

APG's main trunk connects Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand to Toyo with branching units to reach Hong Kong, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and South Korea. The Singapore/Japan latency is low: 64 ms RTD. About a half millisecond higher than ASE, which is the lowest latency cable for that route. It is hence a good complement to ASE as a back up path for those placing a premium on speed. The cable is also good value. A 10G Singapore to Tokyo (SG1/TY2) is only $3,250 per month on a two year term. 

The Vietnam branch has been riddled with outages attributed to ships and fishing. China and Japan both have two landings. Lots of carriers have acquired APG capacity so there is no need to go to a consortium to get it. However, the last two years have not been kind to the cable. In 2023 down time was 7 months and already this year 5 months. 

Map of the APG fibre optic subsea cable serving Southeast Asia.



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