SEA-US subsea cable open for business, HK-G extension underway

SEA-US
Image credit: NEC/Telin USA

RAM Telecom International (RTI) and NEC announced that the Southeast Asia-United States Cable System (SEA-US) is ready for commercial service, and that construction has begun on an extension of that system – the Hong Kong-Guam Cable System (HK-G).

The SEA-US consortium’s $250 million investment in SEA-US delivers an initial design capacity of 20 Tbps of capacity, using NEC’s 100-Gbps submarine cable technology. According to NEC, SEA-US’s capacity is not only essential to facilitating exponentially growing demand for bandwidth between Asia and North America, but also enables onward connectivity to existing and planned submarine cable systems, including the HK-G announced by RTI’s affiliate, RTI Connectivity. (RTI-C). NEC is the supplier for the HK-G extension.

Meanwhile, RTI-C and NEC also said that the marine route survey for HK-G is now underway. The information gathered during the survey will shape the final route engineering that will be undertaken. The 3,900-km HK-G will land in Piti, Guam at the recently completed Teleguam Holdings (GTA) cable landing station, the same facility being utilized for SEA-US.

“Transpacific capacity demand will continue to outweigh existing supply for many years to come, and RTI’s SEA-US investment is now providing essential route diversity capabilities and onward connectivity options for our clients,” said RTI president and CEO Russ Matulich.

As for HK-G, he added, “Once completed, HK-G will seamlessly interconnect with SEA-US, allowing customers to not only diversify their traffic between Hong Kong to Los Angeles, but also enabling them to port their existing capacity to different destinations.”

The SEA-US consortium includes Globe Telecom, GTA (Guam), GTI, Hawaiian Telcom, RTI, Telin, and Telin USA.

In related news, NEC also announced that the completion of the Sistem Kabel Rakyat 1Malaysia (SKR1M) submarine cable linking Peninsular Malaysia with Sabah and Sarawak.

SKR1M was established through a public-private partnership (PPP) collaboration between Telekom Malaysia and the Malaysian Government via the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC). TT dotCom, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Time dotcom, also funded and owns a portion of the cable.

SKR1M was built to enhance existing domestic submarine cable connectivity between Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak, catering for future bandwidth growth requirements. The new 100-Gbps submarine cable system is upgradable to 12.8 Tbps of capacity, spans over 3,800 kilometers, and lands at six landing points: Kuantan, Mersing, Kuching, Bintulu, Miri, and Kota Kinabalu.

SKR1M

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