The New AUG (Asia United Gateway) East Cable

Singtel is leading a consortium of Asian carriers and American tech giants that will finance a new intra-asian cable connecting Japan, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea. Details are sparse. Press releases say it will be a high fibre count network. My guess is at least 12 pairs and as much as 24. Two core fibre is also a possibility given NEC's participation. What is striking is that SJC2 and ADC just went in service with Apricot also expected to be RFS this year, yet here is another cable with a similar Southeast Asian footprint under development. This suggests to me that traffic is growing faster than anticipated with the carriers under pressure to catch up to the rapidly growing market. The other notable feature is the absence of any landings in Hong Kong or mainland China. Since China has emerged as the regional bully, the cable's name is probably not a coincidence.


Consortium members include Singtel, Amazon, Microsoft, Arteria Networks (Japan), Chunghwa (Taiwan incumbent), Dreamline (Korea), Globe (Philippines), Telekom Malaysia, and Unified National Networks (Brunei). It is also interesting how few incumbents are involved in the project. Most are competitive carriers. The advantages are that competitive carriers are more flexible and move faster. I suspect this project will be distinguished by a large number of new cable landings, cable landing stations, and back haul routes for subsea traffic in order to improve physical diversity. For example, both Dreamline and Arteria have their own terrestrial backbones with unique rights of way. Hence they offer physical diversity on land. It is known that Chunghwa is creating two new cable landings for the project. The expected RFS is third quarter of 2029. Cable ships are scarce so their availability probably pushed back the expected completion date. Also this project will be complicated because the cable will hug Philippines' West Coast in order to avoid Chinese ship harassment. China claims the entire South China Sea with the demarcation leaving the Philippines with only a slender slice of territorial water. Hugging the coast means that the cable must be buried. This in return requires a huge amount of coordination with local authorities as well as a very detailed geophysical survey. The trenching means the project will be expensive. On the bright side, it will enjoy less latency than Apricot, which is on the other side of the Philippines. It also sends a message to China that regional governments will use the South China Sea for cables.

No maps have been released for this project probably to keep the Chinese guessing. The same reason there are no Chinese carriers in the project. NEC, known for its multicore research, is the construction vendor. Generally, NEC and Hauwei dominate Southeast Asian projects.

Arteria indicated in its press release that it will launch a new low latency service using AUG East for for financial market traders. It will create low latency fibre backhaul from the CLS to the key financial data trading centers. 

Photo of the AUG East Consortium Representatives


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Facebook's Semi-Secret W Cable

How To Calculate An IRU Price For a 100G Wavelength