Facebook invests in undersea cable project

As reported by the BBC, Facebook has invested in a 6,214-mile Asian undersea cable project. The Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) is designed to improve Internet speeds for citizens and businesses in the region. The cable will run directly from Malaysia to South Korea and Japan, with links branching off to other countries.

According to the BBC report, the project to construct and maintain APG is funded by a group that includes two large Chinese internet service providers, China Telecom and China Unicom.
The fibre-optic cable will help the countries send and receive data to North America faster, according to consortium leader Time Dotcom.

“This lowers our dependencies on Singapore as the main gateway for internet traffic,” said its chief executive Saiful Husni.

“We can now channel high volumes of this traffic on our network with the lowest latency [access time], directly to the US.”

Internet traffic can be slowed by the number of “hops” traffic has to make as it traverses different stretches of cables, and as it passes through different landing stations.

At this stage we don’t know who or when the fibre will be installed but there is no doubt it will be one very big contract to win!

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