PLDT Begins Construction of Asia Direct Cable

PLDT Inc. announced Monday that they had started the initial phase of the construction of the Asia Direct Cable (ADC) in Batangas. The ADC project is estimated to be completed by the end of 2023.

The ADC submarine cable spans 9,400 kilometers, connecting China (Hong Kong SAR and Guangdong Province), Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The ADC consortium comprises CAT(Thailand), China Telecom, China Unicom, PLDT (the Philippines), Singtel (Singapore), SoftBank (Japan), Tata Communications (India) and Viettel (Vietnam). The ADC cable system is supplied by NEC.

The ADC cable system will feature a minimum of 200G per wavelength based on its DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing) system design. Once fully equipped, this will provide PLDT an additional international network capacity of at least 36Tbps (terabytes per second) for faster delivery of hyperscale data across East and Southeast Asia, significantly expanding PLDT's network bandwidth going in and out of the country.

PLDT's total investment in the ADC cable system amounts up to P4.4 billion ($75 million), according to The Manila Times.

PLDT will own 19 international submarine cable systems after the upcoming activation of ADC and Apricot cables systems, expanding its current international network capacity of 60 Tbps to over 130 Tbps once fully equipped.