Eight Asian carriers have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for a new regional club cable, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG)
The 4Tbs subsea system will land at nine locations between Singapore and Japan and would go into service in 2011, NTT Communications said.
As well as NTT Com, the cable has investment from China Telecom, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, KT, PLDT, Telekom Malaysia and VNPT.
Telegeography analyst Alan Mauldin said the cable had been rumored for some time and was a successor to APCN-2, an intra-Asia club cable launched in 2001.
"Currently only 15% of APCN-2 potential capacity has been lit so it\'s not going away anytime soon, but as demand grows, the potential capacity can start dwindling rapidly," Mauldin said.
He said consortium members, who include markets with high-bandwidth requirements such as Japan, Korean and China, "don\'t want to get caught having to source all of the future demand requirements on private systems, like EAC-C2C, FLAG/REACH NAL, or TGN-Intra Asia."
The planned cable avoids the earthquake-prone and cable-heavy area to Taiwan\'s south, where six cables were cut in an earthquake on Boxing Day 2006, slowing regional internet bandwidth to a crawl.