By TM

Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), together with the consortium of Asia America Gateway (AAG) submarine cable network, today announced the completion of its comprehensive test requirement. With this announcement, the 20,000 km submarine cable network is ready to go live and start carrying commercial traffic.

AAG is designed to provide a capacity of up to 2 Terabits per second of data bandwidth. It is the first high-bandwidth optical-fiber submarine cable system to directly link South East Asia and the United States. The cable system connects 10 locations in 8 countries across the Asia Pacific Region and the USA, namely 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 for the abovementioned countries towards other regions like Europe, Australia, Africa and other parts of Asia.

Commenting on this achievement, Mohamad Rozaimy Abdul Rahman, Executive Vice President, Global, TM said, “This commercial rollout of AAG marks another milestone for TM in providing reliable, lower latency international connectivity to its global clients from around the world. The AAG project also demonstrated TM's commitment to invest in the development of IP communications in the Asian region and to provide a faster and resilient Internet connection, hence a better surfing experience for Internet users.”

“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. 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,” Rozaimy further explained.

The AAG cable network has been planned and designed to avoid geographically hazardous areas with known seismic activities, increasing the reliability of the traffic between South East Asia and the United States. With an initial equipped capacity of 500 Gigabits per second, the submarine cable 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.

In addition to linking the high growth South East Asia markets to the United States, the AAG cable system also provides seamless connectivity to Australia, India, Europe and even Africa via common landing points/countries along its route. This cable network 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.

The consortium for this AAG project, spearheaded by TM, was formed in April 2007 and besides TM, it is composed of AT&T (United States), Bayan Telecommunications Inc. (Philippines), Bharti Airtel Limited (India), Government of Brunei Darussalam (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 Limited (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 fiber-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.

Besides AAG, TM is also member of the various consortiums for submarine cable systems in the region, which include South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe Cable System 3 (SEA-ME-WE3 – SMW3), SEA-ME-WE4 (SMW4), Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2) and the latest, Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) that will link Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Philippines, Taiwan, China Mainland, Japan and Korea.

About TM

Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), Malaysia's leading integrated information and communications group, offers a comprehensive range of communication services and solutions in broadband, data and fixed-line. As a market leader in the broadband and fixed-line businesses, TM is driven to deliver value to its stakeholders in a highly competitive environment. The Group places emphasis on continuing customer service quality enhancements and innovations.

With its extensive global connectivity, TM is poised to position Malaysia as a regional Internet hub and digital gateway for South-East Asia. In line with this, TM is evolving into a Next Generation Network service provider enabling the Group to enhance its efficiency and productivity while providing enriched products and services.

On the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) front, the Group has always been a major corporate contributor towards responsible activities in the belief that these practices are a fundamental tenet of good corporate governance. The Group promotes 3 major platforms i.e. education, community/nation-building and environment. Under education, TM has spent some RM800 million to develop Multimedia University into one of the top universities in Malaysia with more than 20,000 students. TM has also provided scholarships to over 11,000 graduates pursuing academic programmes locally and overseas. Under the community/nation-building platform, the Group contributes towards causes that bring value to the community and nation at large. TM was awarded the prestigious STAR-BIZ ICRM Corporate Responsibility Award under the workplace category for 2008.