PLDT To Invest in Cable Systems to Link Asia and North America

PLDT Inc plans on investing in more cable systems that would link North America to Asia to entice tech giants such as Facebook to put up data facilities in the Philippines.

Within the next decade, PLDT is looking to reach one petabit per second international capacity to prepare for the potential entry of tech giants looking for sites to invest in.

PLDT Senior Vice President and Head of Enterprise Business Group Jojo Gendrano mentioned how PLDT is planning on investing in a new cable system at least once a year to be able to increase data capacity.

“We try to think 10 years out. We have this thing called Project Peta within our group. We will be at 130 terabits/second [by 2024] and pretty soon we will be touching one petabit/second of aggregate capacity. Probably in five to 10 years, we should hit petabit levels,” mentioned Gendrano.

Last week, PLDT began landing the $75 million Asia Direct Cable (ADC) fiber ports that would link Southeast Asian and East Asian countries. The ADC starts in the Philippines and then reaches Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and China.

When booted in 2023, the ADC will stretch the international capacity of PLDT to 96 terabits per second, which would increase the data speed of the country.

For long-term plans, PLDT Vice President and Global Capacity Strategy Head Gene Sanchez has mentioned that PLDT’s investments in submarine cable systems are targeted to convince tech companies to put up data offices in the country.

“The interest in the Philippines is because of geopolitics. Hong Kong is a big hub for tech firms, but because of the politics between China and the US, they have scaled down their people and, eventually, their operations,”  mentioned Sanchez.

Source: Philstar