NEC signed to build Southeast Asia Japan 2 cable

The consortium behind the 144Tbps Southeast Asia Japan 2 cable (SJC2) has signed NEC to construct the 10,500km cable.

SJC2 will have 11 landing stations — located in Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, and South Korea, with a pair of landings in Taiwan and Japan — and be made up of eight pairs of optical fibre.

The consortium behind the project consists of China Mobile International, Chunghwa Telecom, Chuan Wei, Facebook, KDDI, Singtel, SK Broadband, and VNPT.

“The construction of SJC2 cable is timely and will provide additional bandwidth between Southeast and North Asia, whose combined population of more than 2 billion are driving demand for data as their economies undergo digital transformation,” Singtel VP of carrier services Ooi Seng Keat said in a statement.

“As a new generation multimedia superhighway, the SJC2 can play a pivotal role in facilitating economic cooperation and digital innovation among the countries in this region.”

China Mobile said in a statement it would be solely responsible for the landing stations in China and Hong Kong, with SJC2 complementing China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and this cable makes up one of seven investments the company has made into subsea cables.

On Wednesday, it was reported the US administration is looking to impose tariffs on $60 billion of Chinese imports, with technology and telecommunications squarely in President Trump’s cross hairs.

Chinese tech companies are being targeted due to arrangements that effectively force US companies to give up their technology secrets in exchange for being allowed to operate in the country, along with other allegations of intellectual property theft.

In May, NEC demonstrated speeds of 50.9Tbps across subsea cables of up to 11,000km on a single optical fibre through the use of C+L-band erbium-doped optical fibre amplifiers (EDFA), amounting to speeds of 570 petabits per second-kilometre.

To hit those speeds, NEC researchers developed a multi-level, linear, and non-linear algorithm to obtain an optimisied 32 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) or opt32 constellation with a higher limit for non-linear capacity specifically for transmission across subsea cables.

NEC announced the completion of the 54Tbps Asia-Pacific Gateway cable in November 2016 between China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore. The cable is owned by China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, NTT Communications, KT Corporation, LG Uplus, StarHub, Chunghwa Telecom, CAT, Global Transit Communications, Viettel, and VNPT.

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