SingTel and six other companies – including Google – have signed an agreement to build the $400 million Southeast Asia Japan Cable system (SJC) – potentially the world’s largest ever cable.
The 8,300-km cable, which is expected to be operational by the second quarter of 2012, runs between Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Japan.
The six-fiber pair cable has a design capacity of 17 Tbps and can be upgraded to 23 Tbps, SingTel said.
Other members of the SJC consortium are Google, SingTel’s Philippines affiliate Globe Telecom, Japan’s KDDI, the SingTel-Bharti JV Network i2i, Indian carrier Reliance Globalcom, Singapore-owned Telemedia Pacific and Indonesia’s Telkom.
KDDI, Google and SingTel are also direct shareholders of the trans-Pacific Unity cable, which is due to start service in mid-2010.
Mark Chong, SingTel executive vice president for networks, said the SJC would link to the Unity system, which lands in Japan.
“As the SJC connects Singapore to other cable systems in Asia, it will provide access to other parts of the region and serve as an important cable diversity route. SJC is designed to avoid outage prone areas,” Chong said.
The consortium could be expanded to include other carriers in the future, SingTel said.