SCREENGRAB from www.globe.com.ph
Globe Telecom has joined a multinational consortium that will build and complete a $250-million underwater cable linking Southeast Asia and the United States by the end of 2016, a statement on Friday showed.
Globe’s share in the project would amount to about $80 million, the company said in a statement.
The undersea cable system will provide “superior latency delivering an additional 20 terabits per second capacity, utilizing the latest 100 gigabits per second transmission equipment. The additional capacity will cater to the exponential growth in bandwidth between the two continents.”
According to Gil Genio, Globe chief operating officer, the the SEA-US project will boost local economic growth as it provides support for expanding business requirement for data.
The Philippines, he noted, has become the preferred destination for the outsourcing and offshoring industry, including major call centers, business process outsource providers, global financial institutions and a host of other multinationals that require very large bandwidth.
Linking five areas and territories that include Manado (Indonesia), Davao (Philippines), Piti (Guam), Oahu (Hawaii, United States) and Los Angeles (California, United States), the SEA-US project will be approximately 15,000 kilometers in length and provide route diversity from North Pacific, avoiding earthquake prone areas in East Asia. The cable system is expected to provide more efficient connectivity to about 1.5 billion people.
Apart from Globe Telecom, members of the SEA-US consortium include PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin), Telkom USA, GTI Corporation (a member of the Globe Group of companies), RAM Telecom International (RTI), Teleguam Holdings (GTA) and Hawaiian Telcom (HTEL). The SEA-US cable project will be undertaken by NEC.
Also, Globe Telecom is a member of an international group of telecommunications and technology companies operating the Southeast Asia-Japan Cable system—an 8,900-kilometer link spanning Brunei, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines.
The cable infrastructure is currently being upgraded to bring an increase of 6.5 Tb/s capacity with the state of the art 100G technology. Miguel R. Camus