TM, 14 other telcos in undersea cable project

PETALING JAYA: Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) and 14 global telcos will set up a consortium for the establishment of a submarine cable system known as the Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5) connecting Asia, Africa and Europe.
The Construction and Maintenance Agreement for SEA-ME-WE 5 among the consortium members was signed last Friday and the submarine cable system is expected to start carrying commercial traffic by early 2016.
The consortium members are Bangladesh Submarine Cable Co Ltd, China Mobile International Ltd, China Telecommunications Global Ltd, China United Network Communications Group Co Ltd, Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Co, Orange (formerly France Telecom), Myanmar Post and Telecom, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International, Saudi Telecom Co, Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Italia Sparkle, TOT Public Ltd Co, Yemen International Telecommunications Co and TM.
Communications and Multimedia Ministry deputy chief secretary general II Datuk Che Azemi Haron said in a statement on Friday that the collaboration would benefit the nation's ICT development initiatives to extend the regional network as well as to improve communications infrastructure and uptake of services.
TM chairman Datuk Seri Dr Halim Shafie said the new submarine cable system will provide higher bandwidth capacity by using the latest 24Tbps (terabits per second) with the latest 100Gbps (gigabits per second) wavelength technology.
SEA-ME-WE 5 will provide seamless connectivity with the capability of originating or terminating traffic from the Points-of-Presence (POPs) in Singapore (Equinix and Global Switch) as well as in France (Marseilles) and Italy (Palermo) whereby the terrestrial link will be part of the SEA-ME-WE 5 system.
Malaysia will be one of the landing countries which will serve TM's future business needs, especially its organic IP traffic.
With a total distance of about 20,000km, SEA-ME-WE 5 will provide extensive connectivity to 17 countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. They are Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, UAE, Oman, Djibouti, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, France and Malaysia.
It will also provide an alternative route to Europe for TM's IP traffic, which is currently mostly dependent on the network to the US. Past catastrophic failures in the Asia-Pacific region due to earthquakes or tsunami had affected TM's services.