Improving Your Singapore Subsea Cable Resiliency: AAE1 & BBG

Although most subsea cables with Singapore POPs land at Singapore, some do not, and these exceptions are the keys to better uptime for your Layer 1 network.

Five fibre pair AAE1 lands at a Penang, Malaysia CLS that has a fully diverse fibre ring for automatic route protection into Singapore. Each side of the fibre ring uses a separate bridge to cross the Malaysian/Singapore border. One side of the ring terminates at the older of the two Global Switch data centers and the other at SG3. So AAE1 neither lands at Singapore nor uses any of the Singapore cable landing stations. This is one reason why AAE1 is a 'must' for network capacity buyers. Other reasons include low latency for the Marseille/Singapore end points and relatively good pricing due to the system's high capacity.

Bay of Bengal Gateway also lands in Penang, Malaysia, but my understanding is that it and AAE1 use different cable landing stations. However, I have not seen backhaul maps so I cannot claim the respective terrestrial routes are completely diverse all the way into Singapore. I will update the readers on this point shortly.

Obviously, AAE1 should be part of any network linking Marseille to Singapore. Similarly, BBG is an essential ingredient for Layer 1 networks that link either the Middle East via Oman Dubai or India to Singapore.

Map of Fibre Optic AAE1 Subsea Cable

Map of Fibre Optic Bay of Bengal Gateway Subsea Cable

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