New Asian cable coming; NTT to buy PC

Eight major carriers in Asia have announced plans for a new undersea cable project called the Asia-Pacific Gateway. The 8,000-km submarine pipe will be owned by China Telecom, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, KT, NTT Communications, PLDT, Telekom Malaysia and Vietnam's VNPT, and it will link South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. It likely will begin service in 2011, with an initial capacity of 4 terabits per second. The project is one of several submarine cable builds running concurrently as the telecom sector looks to answer global bandwidth demand.

Meanwhile, there was more big news on the undersea cable front in Asia, as Japan's NTT will acquire Pacific Crossing and its 21,000-km PC-1 cable connecting Japan and the U.S. The agreement comes about two months after it became clear that NTT and Pacnet both were in the running to make a deal with Pacific Crossing, which to date has been owned by about 20 different investors.

For more:
- IDG News Service has this story

Related articles
Bidders for the PC-1 cable became clear in March
TeleGeography recently said 16 undersea cables were in the works