wonder how much the toll gonna be like...

KUALA LUMPUR: Seventeen major tlecommunications companies signed a pact Friday to build a US$500 million (euro360 million) undersea fiber optic cable between Southeast Asia and the United States they claim will be relatively safe from earthquakes and tsunamis.

The link will offer "a timely increase in both the capacity and diversity of Internet links between Asia and the U.S., bearing in mind the disruptions caused by the recent Taiwan earthquake,'' Abdul Wahid Omar, chief executive of Telekom Malaysia, said at the signing ceremony.

Internet users will get faster and more reliable service once the high-bandwidth cable starts operating in December 2008, he said.

Telekom Malaysia, which is leading the consortium of companies, said construction of the 20,000-kilometer (12,428-mile) link would begin immediately. 

It said it would be the first submarine cable system linking Southeast Asia directly to the United States.

The fiber optic cable, dubbed the Asia-America Gateway, will connect the U.S. West Coast with Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii, as well as offer "seamless interconnection'' for those locations with Europe, Africa and Australia, Telekom said in a statement.

It will "provide an alternative and a more secure link for traffic from the region to the U.S.A.,'' Telekom said. 

"This low-risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis.''

A magnitude 7.1 quake snapped undersea cables near Taiwan on Dec. 26, disrupting phone and Internet communications across Asia as companies scrambled to reroute traffic through satellites and undamaged cables. 

Services were gradually restored in the days after the quake.

Malaysian Communications Minister Lim Keng Yaik said the cable will strengthen communications and business ties between Asia and the United States by ramping up international broadband capacity at competitive costs.

"This impressive joint effort will go a long way in increasing broadband uptake in this region, which will in turn increase the overall appeal for global investments and increase the competitiveness of the countries,'' Lim said.

Parties involved in the project include AT&T Inc. from the United States, the British Telecom Global Network Services, Eastern Communications Philippines Inc., India's Bharti AirTel, Thailand's CAT Telekom, Indonesia's Indosat and PT Telkom, Telecom New Zealand International, Singapore's StarHub and Australia's Telstra.

Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent and Japan's NEC Corp. have been awarded the contract for the construction of the link, officials said. - AP

First, lets clarify a few misconceptions: submarine cables are not under the seabed. It is just lay across the sea. It is only when it crosses major shipping lines and fishing zones (mostly near the coast) that it is lay (5 to 10m below) under the seabed. Therefore, it is not unusual for submarine cable to be cut, mostly due to deepsea fishing.

So when one submarine cable is severed, the operator generally have "restoration", either on their own (self-healing cables) or using their competitors cables. This minimized the disruption. What is unusual is that this earthquake in Taiwan sever all the major cables (see above for the fibers near Taiwan).

As far as reports goes, SeaMeWe-3, ACPN2, C2C and EAC (ANC) (link) are severed. In other words, all the major submarine cable at the same time. Under other circumstance, when SeaMeWe-3 cuts, we can fall back to APCN2 or C2C or EAC. But when all of them are cut at the sametime, there is really nothing to fall back upon.

But how does this affects Singapore? Doesn't Singapore has a lot of submarine fiber?

Indeed Singapore has: APC, APCN, APCN2, SeaMeWe-2, SeaMeWe-3, C2C, EAC2, I2I, TIS and TIC or a total capacity of 28Tbps (assuming full capacity using DWDM).

We also have two path to US, going East via the Pacific Ocean or going West via Europe through the Altantic Ocean. However, as fiber system to Europe is limited (and hence more expensive) and higher latency (about 500+ms), the normal route is to go East via the Pacific Ocean, cheaper and faster (~300ms).

In other words, we are heavily depending on the SeaMeWe-3, C2C, APCN2 and EAC to bring us to Japan before hopping to other trans-pacific submarine system like Japan-US, PC-1 or China-US

So with SeaMeWe-3, C2C, ACPN2 and EAC all severed at the same time, we are literally screwed.

Now, it is easy to say lets build more submarine fibers. It is really expensive, about US$100k/km (not US$500k/km as reported in the papers. US$500k only if you need to lay it under the seabed).

The economical way is that it transit via the North Asia (and hence picking up traffic from Japan, Hong Kong/China and Taiwan) before going on to US. Doing so means we end up going via the North Asia route, following a similar path near the zone where the earthquake hits. The "safe" way is to go to Papua New Guinea/Solomon Islands then to Hawaii to US but erm, what do you pick up at Papua New Guinea?

Even the new 20,000 km Asia-America Gateway (AAG) is likely to follow the North Asia route I suspect since the members includes AiTi (Brunei), CAT Telekom (Thailand), PLDT (Philippines), REACH (Hong Kong), StarHub (Singapore) and VNPT (Vietnam) lead by Telecom Malaysia (Malaysia).

The logical solution is to develop more submarine fibers to the west, to Europe/India and then from there across Altantic ocean so we have a loop. Believe me, IDA has competent people who already knows this (and long time ago I would say). But multi-billions dollars project is going to take time. Not to mention the challenges to lay across Straits of Malacca (another story, another day). Alt, go down to Australia and then across the Pacific to US altho going to Australia cuts through the coral rift, technical and environment-politically challenging.

What about using satellite as some angry letters in the papers suggest?

One fiber optic core at current economical technology carries 10Gbps of traffic. Using satellite, assuming the state of the art 10bit/hz, we would need to reserve 1000Mhz of channel bandwidth to match ONE core of fiber optic. Submarine fibers generally has 4-8 pairs of fiber core so do your own math. The latency for satellite is also 400-500ms per hop. To get to US, we need approximately 2 hop.

The undersea cable system, to be called the Asia-America Gateway, will link Malaysia and the United States via Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii, with branches into Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam and Vietnam.

"The proposed Asia-America Gateway will provide much needed direct access and diverse routing between Southeast Asia and the US and will have advantages over the traditional trans-Pacific routes in that it will avoid some of the areas most prone to seismic activity, conditions which are hazardous to undersea cables," PLDT said.

The cable system will span 20,000 kilometers and will use the latest Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technologies with a minimum design capacity of 1.28 terabits per second.

As a gateway, the cable system has the potential to extend capacity to other locations in northeast and southeast Asia, India, Australia, Africa and Europe, as it is designed to provide a high degree of inter-connectivity with existing and planned high bandwidth systems.

The system will be ready for service by 2008.

then what we gonna do?

if like this.. then.. with TMNut backbone.. will we..

suffer from "NOT ENOUGH BANDWIDTH" because of S.E.A WAN connected thru us?

So i heard from Buletin Utama. Keng Yaik says it will cost 1.8b Ringgit, over 20000km long, and will be completed by December next year. TM only invested 50m Ringgit in this (lol?) while the rest are covered by other companies. Good news or bad news ?

Summary:

Asia-America Gateway (AAG) that will be finished by December 2008 will increase Malaysia's International bandwidth. So expect faster internet connection to overseas. 

Anyway below is just some interesting stuff to read, enjoy.
Malaysia leads plan for US-region cable link
Source: http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?f...16&sec=business
About the cables under the sea ( this is a case study about Singapore concerning international bandwidth )
Source: http://james.seng.sg/archives/2006/12/30/s...rs_in_asia.html
I recommend reading the source as it has pictures showing the cable routes. Anyway interesting stuff.
Old news about undersea cables and how earth quakes in Taiwan effect them

Source: http://www.blueline.co.id/promotions_events_news/news.html
It's quite good that Malaysia is taking the initiative here. So i'm pretty optimistic for 2008 since tmnut is partnering with Verizon to deliver our 4mb broadband, and our international link will get a huge boost in bandwidth. Not only that, but i hear that the government is looking for companys by looking at their performance to see who will be fit to bridge the last mile for fiber optics in malaysia more news on that would be appreciated.

good calculation you have there
why dont you submit it to their CEO or engineer

their CEO dont know "who am i"

and maybe their engineer also knew the problem but the telekom dont want to pay more but just want the money

this is all talk and we all know that tmnut & lim keng yaek only know how to talk kok all the time. as far as i am concerned this is just vaporware and nothing will come out of it. when our speeds increase and our lines are stable then i will believe it. TALK IS CHEAP!

No idea. That's what i heard on the news.

It's not all talk. They signed the freaking agreement already. Same thing with the Verizon partnership. It will take time of course (years), Rome was not built in a day. If by Dec 2008 our speed to USA is still gay, then you can start blaming them.

No idea. That's what i heard on the news.

It's not all talk. They signed the freaking agreement already. Same thing with the Verizon partnership. It will take time of course (years), Rome was not built in a day. If by Dec 2008 our speed to USA is still gay, then you can start blaming them.

Their the ones who have the contract to build it, not Tmnut. So yes i don't doubt it will be finished by 2008 (hopefully). It's more believable anyway. Remember Japanese are very hard working, unlike us...
Ok what i really want to know is we all know how much tmnut invested, but does anyone know what the agreement states ? Just how much of the capacity will malaysia get ? Facts not speculation preferably.

Guy, this is true, my company got the job.... and we are going to start it end of this month, sysytem commisioning end of next year.

this had been planned for long time, and it have nothing todo as tmnet listen to user complaint and increase traffic...

oh really? then can you explain why does it take more then one year to complete the job?

Their the ones who have the contract to build it, not Tmnut. So yes i don't doubt it will be finished by 2008 (hopefully). It's more believable anyway. Remember Japanese are very hard working, unlike us...
Ok what i really want to know is we all know how much tmnut invested, but does anyone know what the agreement states ? Just how much of the capacity will malaysia get ? Facts not speculation preferably.

Why only 50 M ? all the new wimax companys they paying 300 mil each to set their stuff up

oh really? then can you explain why does it take more then one year to complete the job?

remember the malaysian chinese more hard working that japanese, the chinese can start working 6am untill 10pm
unlike us... cant use for me and all the hard working malaysian but can use for the lazy slowmyx engineer.

choon

All i can say is tmnut is a godamn stingy arsehole...
they suc our $$$$ so much and they only contribute so little
$$$ for the project....  

I really have doubts for tmnut's sincerity to solved the
international link's problems afterall we user's are
the one who pay for the bills not tmnut...

here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
I'm just hoping TM can unthrottle the P2P after the cable is done.

I'm trying to be really optimistic here but i don't think i am because my toes will start laughing once they get started. This is because i am wondering to which company TMNET has sub-contracted the work to.

It's hard not to see or IGNORE the facts when/if they award the contract to a sub-contractor minus an open tender. Heck, even an open tender is also open to corruption as you invite non-bumi/non-family related companies to tender the job just to make things look good.

How did we end up with the RM 50 million figure? I've gone through all the articles posted here about it as well as The Star. None mention the figure contributed by TM Net. Can the thread starter please provide more clarification?

** Someone already posted an estimation on how much share of the bandwidth we would be getting based on the assumption of RM 50 million/RM 2 Billion ratio on page 2.

I think TM is doing the right thing. The way intercontinental cable systems work is that major telco operators SHARE the cost of construction and maintenance of the network. So, since the cable is expected to run from SE Asia all the way to the West Coast of the USA, paying $50m is proportionate to the SHARE of the bandwidth that TM will get. Bear in mind that bandwidth allocation is also a function of reciprocity i.e. how much traffic originates and terminates between destinations.