PLDT investing P7B in transpacific submarine cable system project

Industry giant PLDT Inc. joined an international consortium composed of tech giants, including Amazon and Facebook, to build a submarine cable system linking Asia and the United States.

PLDT said in a stock exchange filing yesterday it would invest P7 billion, or $136.7 million, in the transpacific cable system dubbed Jupiter.

The undersea cable system, which will connect to PLDT’s landing station in Daet, Camarines Norte, will help the Philippines deal with increasing internet demand, particularly high-bandwidth services like video streaming.

The cable system will also have links in Maruyama and Shima in Japan and Los Angeles, United States. Other consortium members are Japan’s Softbank and NTT Communications, as well as Hong Kong’s PCCW Global.

The cable system was expected to start operations by 2020.

It will come online around the time the Philippine government, through the Department of Information and Communications Technology, expects to have its own international gateway, which aims to support the growth of small internet service providers.

These smaller ISPs could potentially compete with PLDT and its main rival, Globe Telecom, in certain areas, in line with President Duterte’s call for more players in the telco space.

“We are investing in this new cable system in anticipation of the continued explosion of data traffic over the next few years, as households and businesses in the Philippines adopt more and more digital services,” PLDT chair and CEO Manuel V Pangilinan said in a statement yesterday.

PLDT said Jupiter had a total length of about 14,000 kilometers.

It will employ wavelength selectable switch technology to be built based on the “open cable” model. It can deliver a capacity of more than 60 terabits per second from the Philippines to Japan and the US.

“Jupiter will boost the PLDT Group’s capability to offer its customers bandwidth-heavy broadband applications that require international access like IP-based data, high-definition video content, and other multimedia and digital services,” said Kat Luna-Abelarde, PLDT first vice president and CEO of PLDT Global Corp.
PLDT earlier partnered with PCCW to acquire capacity in the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) Cable System, a 25,000-km undersea cable network system that connects Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and Europe.

It was also part of the consortium that built the Asia Submarine-Cable Express (ASE), the largest-capacity international submarine cable system in the Philippines with a landing station located in Daet, Camarines Norte.

PLDT has also landed other international cable systems in the Philippines, such as the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) and the Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe 3 (SEA-ME-WE3), which both land in Nasugbu, Batangas, and the Asia-America Gateway (AAG), in Bauang, La Union.