Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom has joined the New Cross Pacific (NCP) consortium, to help fund a 14,000km trans-Pacific cable.
The operator has joined KT, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and a US-based company to commission the cable.
The NCP will connect mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and North America. It will incorporate DWDM technologies to provide an initial deign capacity of up to 80 Tbps.
Construction of the NCP is now scheduled to commence next month and be completed in the second half of 2017. It will have an estimated cost of “several hundred million US dollars,” according to a statement announcing the signing.
Chunghwa Telecom is already a member of the Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG) and Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC) subsea cable consortia, and decided to invest in the NCP to improve its resiliency and boost its global presence.
“Today Chunghwa Telecom is making the 'Global' agenda our own by expanding the network to satisfy the continuously growing demand from the mobile broadband service, HD Digital Content, cloud computing, and international data centers,” the company said.
“The goal is to lead Taiwan to leap onto the global stage and then to be an information, operation and management center in the Asia-Pacific area.”