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.

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

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