PLDT begins work on $300m undersea cable
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PLDT begins work on $300m undersea cable

The Philippine Long Distance and Telephone Co (PLDT) announced plans today to construct the $300 million Asia Submarine cable Express (ASE).

The cable is expected to be completed in Q3 2012 and will more than double PLDT’s international bandwidth capacity.

The 7,200km undersea cable network project is being undertaken by PLDT, NTT Com of Japan, and StarHub of Singapore, in partnership with NEC Corp and Fujitsu Ltd. The first phase will link between Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore and in the next phase it will connect to Malaysia and potentially China, Vietnam and Thailand

The ASE is a new-generation, high bandwidth, optical fibre undersea cable system. PLDT says it is the biggest capacity international submarine cable to land in the Philippines which will enable PLDT and its group of companies, including Smart, Digitel and Sun to serve the increasing bandwidth requirements of their respective customer base.

"We have designed a future-ready network that can potentially supply more than 15Tbps capacity, initially using 40Gbps per second wavelength technology, and in the future, 100Gbps per second wavelength capability,” commented PLDT Network Services Assurance SVP George Lim.

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