Undersea Cable Will Bring Huge Numbers of Southeast Asians Online
February 16th, 2010
This month, Southeast Asians will find it much easier to surf the internet. A £300 million, 20,000 kilometre cable will be ready for service, offering higher speed broadband connections to Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.
Southeast Asians have long suffered from slow connection speeds that have left them frustrated and less likely to shop online. The new cable will provide much-needed capacity, and faster, more reliable connectivity to sustain the massive growth in Asia’s online population, with a capability of delivering 960 gigabytes a second from each of its five fibre-optic lines. With the new Asia-America Gateway, as the fibre-optic cable is called, Southeast Asians will be much more likely to spend more time, and money, online.
The project was headed by Google and an international consortium, and took two years. The resulting pipe that spans from Los Angeles to Japan is 6,200 miles in length.
But they didn’t stop there: Google has just recently signed a second deal with a group of telecommunications firms to connect Southeast Asia with the world’s fastest undersea fibre-optic line. The line has a design capacity of 17 terabytes per second (a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes). This second project is expected to be completed by 2012.
