KUALA LUMPUR: Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM), together with the consortium of Asia America Gateway (AAG) submarine cable network, announced today the 20,000km network is ready to go live and start carrying commercial traffic.

In a statement today, TM said this followed the completion of the comprehensive test requirement at the AAG network, which is designed to provide up to two terabits per second of data bandwidth.

It is the first high-bandwidth optical-fibre submarine cable system to directly link Southeast Asia and the United States.

The cable system connects 10 locations in eight countries across the Asia Pacific Region — Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, Hong Kong and the Philippines to the United States, where it lands in Guam, Hawaii and California.

The AAG also provides seamless interconnection to other regions like Europe, Australia, Africa and other parts of Asia. It complements existing cable systems such as the Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN 2) and Japan-US Cable Network currently connecting to North America via North Asia.

"Besides providing additional bandwidth capacity, the AAG submarine cable system is intended to become an alternative and a more secure link for traffic from the region to the USA," TM global executive vice president Mohamad Rozaimy Abdul Rahman.

"This low risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, which have previously damaged submarine cable systems, resulting in major disruptions to international Internet links."

With an initial equipped capacity of 500 gigabits per second, the network is upgradeable using field tested dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology, which enables it to provide upgradeable future proof transmission facilities that support Internet and e-commerce traffic.

Spearheaded by TM, the consortium include AT&T (United States), Bayan Telecommunications Inc (Philippines), Bharti Airtel Ltd (India), Government of Brunei, British Telecom Global Network Services (UK), CAT Telecom PCL (Thailand), Eastern Telecommunications Philippines Inc (Philippines), FPT Telecom (Vietnam), Philippine Long Distance Telephone (Philippines), PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Indonesia), Indosat (Indonesia), Saigon Postal Corporation (Vietnam), StarHub (Singapore), Telcotech Ltd (Cambodia), Telstra (Australia), Telecom New Zealand International (New Zealand), Viettel (Vietnam), and Vietnam Posts & Telecommunications Group (Vietnam).

TM owns or leases capacity on more than 10 submarine cable systems, which span more than 60,000 fibre-route miles around the globe, including several submarine cable routes that the company uses to carry traffic between the Asia-Pacific region and North America.