By Nick Wood, Total Telecom

International Internet connectivity or the lack thereof is contributing to a vast a digital divide among members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Preliminary research published by consultancy Terabit at CommunicAsia on Tuesday revealed that top-ranked Singapore enjoyed 3 Tbps of international bandwidth at the end of 2014, while bottom-ranked Laos had just 13 Gbps.

“There is a huge difference between the bandwidth-haves and have-nots,” said Michael Ruddy, director of international research at Terabit.

Completing the top three are Thailand and the Philippines, which each have international capacity in excess of 1 Tbps, while completing the bottom three are Cambodia and Myanmar, which have 22 Gbps and 32 Gbps respectively.

The UN's Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has launched an initiative tasked with narrowing the digital divide by improving the underlying Internet infrastructure in the region. Called the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS), it aims to bring regional governments together for the purpose of building new cable systems linking their countries with one another and other parts of the world.

Ruddy said ESCAP should focus on improving terrestrial links in Asia-Pacific, and deploy networks along existing infrastructure routes, such as energy distribution and road networks, to keep a lid on costs.

Even well-connected countries like Singapore would benefit from new cable routes, he noted, because they would add redundancy and avoid submarine cable bottlenecks in the Straits of Malacca and the Suez Canal, among others.

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