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.
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