SingTel Joints SJC Consortium

SingTel has signed up to join the SJC consortium to build the $400 million Southeast Asia Japan Cable system (SJC) – potentially the world’s largest ever cable. The other members of the SJC consortium includes Goolge, Globe Telecom, KDDI, Network i2i, Reliance Globalcom, Telemedia Pacific and PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International. The consortium may be expanded to include other carriers in the future.

The 8,900-km SJC cable, which is expected to be operational by the second half of 2013, runs between Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Japan.The SJC cable consists of six-fiber pairs, has a design capacity of 17 Tbps and can be upgraded to 23 Tbps.

The SJC can link to the Unity cable system at their common landing station, the Chikura Cable Landing Station in Japan. SingTel, KDDI and Google are also consortium members of the trans-Pacific Unity cable system.

The SJC connects Singapore to other cable systems in Asia, it will provide access to other parts of the region and serve as an important cable diversity route. The SJC is designed to avoid outage prone areas.

When completed, the SJC will form an effective diversity and supplement to another major intra-Asia consortium cable -- the Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN-2) which has been running for more than 10 years. With this perspective,  the SJC consortium may be expanded to include carriers in China, Hong Kong, etc.