Japan's NEC has won the contract to deploy Asia's new subsea cable, the 10,400km Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG).
NEC revealed that the consortium of operators backing the APG cable, including NTT Com, KT and Chunghwa Telecom, have signed a contract with NEC in Beijing.
The APG cable will run between mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore.
The system will have a transmission speed of 40Gb/s per wavelength. NTT Com last month committed to upgrading its PC-1 cable to 100G.
The companies have not disclosed the exact size of the contract, but NEC has referred to it as a “multi-million dollar” deal.
Chunghwa and KT were among the six operators to sign an initial MoU to build the APG in May 2009.
The others were China Telecom, China Unicom, PLDT, Telekom Malaysia and VNPT. StarHub also joined the consortium the following month.
The cable project appears to have fallen behind schedule, as it was originally targeted for completion this year.