Asia Direct Cable (ADC) Consortium has selected NEC Corporation for building a submarine cable.
The 9,400-kilometer long submarine cable, connecting China (Hong Kong SAR and Guangdong Province), Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, is expected to be completed by the fourth quarter of 2022.

The cable will feature multiple pairs of high capacity optical fibers and is designed to carry more than 140 Tbps of traffic, enabling high capacity transmission of data across the East and Southeast Asian regions.

ADC’s high capacity allows it to support increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications which are driven by technological advancements in 5G, the cloud, the Internet-of-Things and Artificial Intelligence.

This optical fiber submarine cable system will provide seamless connectivity to the countries it lands in and the regions it services, said Atsushi Kuwahara, general manager, Submarine Network Division, NEC Corporation.

The submarine cable systems market in Asia Pacific is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 9.8 percent from 2018 to 2027, increasing from $5.6 billion to $14.7 billion over the nine-year period, according to Research and Markets.

ADC consortium members include CAT, China Telecom, China Unicom, PLDT, Singtel, SoftBank, Tata Communications and Viettel.

SoftBank said it will provide its Maruyama Cable Landing Station for ADC cable landing in Japan. Maruyama CLS has been serving its landing services for many submarine cables including JUPITER, which is expected to start operating in 2020.