One of the older cable systems, the APC cable, was commissioned in 1993. Built at a cost of US$335 million, the 7,500 km was Asia’s longest optical highway at that time. For the first time, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan are linked by a single optical fibre telecommunications backbone. The APC cable system transmits at a speed of 560 Mbps and is capable of carrying 52,920 simultaneous telephone conversations.
SEA-ME-WE 2 was commissioned in July 1994. The cable, an analogue conventional coaxial system, links 13 countries: Algeria, Cyprus, Djibouti, Egypt, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Turkey. Spanning 18,000 km it was the longest fibre submarine cable system laid at that time. The US$800 million cable system was an instant success that led to the construction of SEA-ME-WE 3.
Completed in December 1999, SEA-ME-WE 3 is one of the world’s longest and largest capacity submarine cable networks. Costing US$1.5 billion, the cable spans 38,000 km and has 39 landing points straddling the Pacific Rim, South East Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe. The cable utilises 10 Gbps Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology with Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) transmission which offers unparalleled enhanced network resilience and connectivity. SEA-ME-WE 3 has been upgraded to a capacity of 55 Gbps, capable of supporting 240,000 simultaneous conversations.
SingTel has major stakes in the two Asia Pacific Cable Network cables. The 12,000 km APCN network links Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Commissioned in March 1997, it provides a direct optical link between Australia and the rest of Asia. APCN which costs US$640 million to build, has a design capacity of 10 Gbps .
APCN2, a 19,000 km cable, with a design capacity of 2.56 Tbps and a current equipped capacity of 160 Gbps, was completed end 2001. The cable, costing US$1 billion, links China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan.
The China-US cable, built to the cost of US$1.1 billion, supplements SingTel’s cable capacity in the Trans-Pacific cable networks and offer enhanced cable diversity and reliability for international telecommunications services. With a capacity of 80 Gbps, the 29,000 km long cable has immense capacity to support the telecommunications needs between Asian Countries and the US.
The Japan-US cable network is a 4-fiber pair system with a design capacity of 640 Gbps. The 21,000 km cable network costs US$1.32 billion. Completed in September 2001, it is currently equipped up to 400 Gbps and offers enhanced cable diversity and reliability for international telecommunications services across the Pacific Ocean.
In July 2000, SingTel formed a subsidiary, C2C Pte Ltd, to construct the first private submarine cable system in the Asia Pacific at a cost of US$2 billion. The 17,000 km C2C cable network (C2Ccn) was completed in January 2002. It is a fully redundant and highly diversified network with a design capacity of 7.68 Tbps (equivalent to 90 million simultaneous conversations). C2Ccn connects China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan, with onward connectivity with the United States. C2C offers a comprehensive range of support services, such as co-location and data centre services.
In March 2001, SingTel and Bharti Group formed a 50:50 private submarine cable development company, Network i2i, to build the world's largest cable network in terms of bandwidth capacity (8.4 Tbps). The US$650 million i2i cable network (i2icn) is a self-healing 10,800 km long ring network linking Singapore and Chennai. The entire i2i cable network utilises the latest Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology to provide transmission facilities, which can be upgraded, to ensure durability. i2icn will link to SingTel's extensive cable networks to the rest of the world. This includes the C2C cable network, SEA-ME-WE 3 and APCN2. The i2icn was completed in April 2002.
The Southern Cross cable lit up in November 2000 removing the bandwidth bottleneck between Australasia and the United States. Originally designed to deliver 120 Gbps of fully protected capacity, Southern Cross was expanded in the first quarter of 2003 to 240 Gbps, with the potential of increasing total protected network capacity to 480 Gbps. Southern Cross now has the potential to provide for Australasia's bandwidth requirements for the next five years, delivering 480 times the capacity of the PacRim system - enough to transfer a 3 km-high stack of typed documents or eight full-length motion pictures every second.
The TIS (Thailand-Indonesia-Singapore) cable began carrying commercial traffic in December 2003. The 1,100 km long cable network lands in Songkhla (Thailand), Batam (Indonesia) and Changi (Singapore) and is linked to SingTel's extensive submarine cable networks in Asia Pacific. The US$36 million consortium cable has an initial capacity of 30 Gbps.
In March 2004, SingTel and 15 other telecommunications carriers signed an agreement to construct a new submarine cable, SEA-ME-WE 4, which spans some 20,000 km from Singapore to France via the Middle East. The cable is expected to be ready for service in the third quarter of 2005 and will carry telephone, Internet and various broadband data streams.