NEC has bagged a submarine cable deal from Singtel and the members of the Southeast Asia – Japan 2 consortium (SJC2) to build submarine cable.

Apart from NEC, major submarine cable companies include Alcatel Submarine Networks, Fujitsu, Huawei Marine Networks, and TE SubCom.

NEC will be the supplier for the most advanced optical fiber submarine cable system, landing at 11 locations across 9 countries and regions.

“SJC2 will provide connectivity and network diversity, while serving to complement other Intra-Asia submarine cables, among others, such as the original SJC built in 2013,” said Atsuo Kawamura, NEC’s Senior Vice President, Telecom Carrier Business Unit.

Singtel said the capacity of the new submarine cable allows the Singapore-based telecom operator to support the high bandwidth requirements of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) applications.

The company did not reveal the investment details for building the submarine cable system.

The proposed 10,500-kilometre submarine cable will be connecting Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, Korea and Japan. Singtel said the submarine cable links 11 cable landing stations in the region and will complete by the fourth quarter of 2020.

China Mobile International, Chunghwa Telecom, Chuan Wei, Facebook, KDDI, Singtel, SK Broadband and VNPT are the members of the consortium.

“The construction of SJC2 cable will provide additional bandwidth between Southeast and North Asia, whose combined population of more than two billion are driving demand for data as their economies undergo digital transformation,” said Ooi Seng Keat, vice president, Carrier Services at Singtel.

The submarine cable will feature up to eight pairs of high capacity optical fibre with a total capacity of 144 Terabits per second, roughly the equivalent of simultaneously streaming 5.76 million ultra-high definition videos per second.

In April 2017, Singtel and its partners announced the construction of the 9,000-kilometre INDIGO submarine cable connecting Singapore to Perth and Sydney, Australia.

In December 2016, Singtel and a consortium of 17 technology / telecom partners completed the 20,000-kilometre Southeast Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5) cable.