The Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE) is a 8148km intra-Asia submarine cable system constructed by a consortium including NTT, PLDT, StarHub and Telekom Malaysia.

The ASE cable consists of 6 fiber pair, connecting Japan to the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore,with branch to Hong Kong.  

The ASE cable system was initially designed with 40 Gbps transmission and OADM technologies, with a design capacity of 15Tbps,  upgradable to a maximum design capacity of 51Tbps using 100 Gbps technology.

Telekom Malaysia (TM) owns one-third stake and two dedicated fiber pairs in the ASE cable system, with which TM builds its wholly owned Cahaya Malaysia Cable system.

The ASE cable system was launched for service on August 20, 2012, supplied by Fujitsu and NEC, with a total cost of about USD430 million, in which Telekom Malaysia invested about USD140 million and PLDT invested about USD55 million.

The ASE cable system lands at the following cable landing stations:

• Shin-Maruyama, Japan
• Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong
• Daet, Philippines
• Mersing, Malaysia
• Changi, Singapore

The ASE cable system is carefully designed to avoid earthquake zone in South Taiwan, offer ultra low latency between Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore by terminating in the neighborhood of Stock Exchanges in Hong Kong and Singapore and landing directly at NTT’s Hong Kong Financial Data Center in Tseung Kwan O.

The typical latency (RTD) over ASE cable system is:

• Hong Kong Stock Exchange to @Tokyo data center: 42.3ms
• Singapore Stock Exchange to @Tokyo data center: 60.0ms
• Singapore Equinix SG1 to Seattle Westin data center: 150ms (over ASE+PC-1 north)
• Malaysia Mersing CLS to @Tokyo data center: 54 ms