Southeast Asia-Japan cable launches across seven countries

27 June 2013 | Kavit Majithia

SingTel has announced that the Southeast Asia-Japan Cable (SJC) is now operational across seven territories.

The system is supplied by TE SubCom and NEC Corporation, and it is designed to provide connectivity to a range of destinations across the world to provide resilient services to other submarine cable systems.

Spanning 8900km, with the potential to extend to a further 9700km, SJC has a project cost of approximately $400 million and consists of six fibre pairs, with a design capacity of 28Tbps. The system connects seven countries or territories including Brunei, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines, including the option to link to Thailand.

“The SJC system signals a milestone for the seven Asia-Pacific countries in the consortium as it will set a new benchmark in global data and information connectivity,” said Ooi Seng Keat, VP, carrier services international business, group enterprise and spokesperson for the SJC consortium.

“The SJC cable route avoids the earthquake zone in North Asia, it enhances the operators’ network resilience by offering cable diversity and reliability in the event of a cable breakage in other undersea networks.”

SingTel claims SJC will deliver the lowest latency connectivity between Asia and the US, and is interconnected with the latest transpacific cable.

SJC is a global consortium composed of a range of Asian countries including China Telecom, KDDI and China Mobile.