The Most Important Subsea Cables RFS 2025: Asia Direct Cable

 ADC was officially open for business November 8th, 2024 with an inauguration ceremony this past December 18th. The eight fibre pair cable is a standard coherent optics subsea network connecting Vietnam, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. The design capacity is 180 Tbps, which makes it currently the highest capacity to serve the critical Southeast Asia Triangle of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. 

Industry insides are extremely excited because there has been a persistent Southeast Asia bandwidth shortage due to the growth in the region's Internet traffic. The shortage has been compounded by chronic and long lasting outages on cables like APG and Vietnam cable branches. APG has been down twelve months out of the last 24. It is a dismal record. Many of the older cables have only a few terabits throughput representing drops in the proverbial bucket. 

NEC built the system which should relieve security concerns about the involvement of Chinese carriers such as China Unicom and China Telecom and the fact that it does land in China. The project was scheduled to go live in 2022 but that proved too optimistic given cable ship shortages plus the Chinese government's delays in issuing permits for the South China Sea (international waters that China claims).

I expect buyers will able to get good deals as low as $15K MRC on long term 100G contracts between the HK, Singapore, and Tokyo city pairs. Buy now or face a capacity shortage in six months.



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