SingTel subsidiary C2C Pte. Ltd. has successfully landed its US$2 billion privately developed C2C undersea cable system on Singapore shores.
The island Republic is the second last cable landing for the 17,000 kilometer cable network, which also connects to China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and the Philippines. Taiwan will be the last on the list; its cable landing is scheduled for the end of August.
C2C’s investors include SingTel, Globe Telecom of the Philippines, GNG Networks of South Korea, Hong Kong’s iAdvantage, Japan’s KDDI, New Century Infocomm Company of Taiwan, and Tycom Asia Networks and Norwest Venture Partners of the U.S.
The cable network uses dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology, with a designed capacity of 7.68Tbps, enabling it to carry 90 million phone conversations simultaneously. According to company officials, its initial capacity of 160Gbps will be 16 times more than the total submarine cable capacity terminating in Singapore to date.
“The rapid liberalization of Asia’s telecommunications industry and the increasing requirements for more bandwidth-intensive applications such as video streaming, have provided the impetus for C2C to work towards an early completion of its cable network,” said Lim Shyong, C2C’s chief executive officer.
“The Singapore cable landing is an important milestone for C2C, coming just after our first anniversary as a company. We are now looking forward to the full completion of the network at the end of the year.”
The northern loop of the cable network covering Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Korea, Japan and the Philippines will be ready for service by end-October 2001; while the southern loop, which extends to Singapore, is expected to carry commercial traffic by December 2001.
C2C is also exploring possible extensions of its cable network to Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia, according to a statement, with onward connectivity to the U.S. In addition, C2C will also operate carrier hotels, or Internet data centers, in key cities to offer its customers seamless city-to-city connectivity.
