Telekom Malaysia(TM) and NTT Communication Corporation (NTT Com) on Monday announced that it has partnered for the construction of Cahaya Malaysia, a new submarine cable system linking Malaysia directly to Hong Kong and Japan. TM said it has invested US$140 million(RM427mil) for the new cable system.
The new cable system is approximately 7,000km long and will be utilizing the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology. It has a total capacity of 500 Gbps. TM currently uses 9 cable system with a total capacity of 453 Gbps.
The construction of Cahaya Malaysia has started and Phase 1 of the cable system linking Malaysia to Japan will be completed by mid 2012 while Phase 2 linking Malaysia to Hong Kong will be completed by end-2012.
Cahaya Malaysia is a two fibre pairs cable system which is part of the 6 fibre pairs cable system that NTT Com is building called Asean Submarine Cable Express(ASE). While Cahaya Malaysia will be owned by TM, the remaining 4 fibre pairs will be owned by NTT which they plan to develop in collaboration with other regional carriers such as in Singapore(StarHub) and Philippines. NTT’s technology partners are NEC and Fujitsu.
TM said Cahaya Malaysia will help improve connectivity to the US, reducing latency by about 25%.
A press release from TM will be updated on this post as soon as it is available
