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BAUANG, La Union: Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) on
Tuesday said it plans to construct a third international submarine
cable landing station in the southern part of the country this year
to serve the rising demand for broadband bandwidth.
Manuel V. Pangilinan, PLDT chairman, said the
company is looking at Visayas or Northern Mindanao for its third
international cable landing station.
“Tentatively, we are looking at Leyte, Cebu,
Cagayan de Oro or Surigao,” he told reporters during the launch of
the company’s second submarine cable network in La Union.
Pangilinan said that the planned international
gateway in the south may cost about $500 million.
The company’s first international submarine
cable landing station is located in Nasugbu, Batangas.
PLDT has invested $50 million, out of the $550
million in funds for the Asia-America Gateway (AAG), a
20,000-kilometer fiber optic cable network.
PLDT will be the new cable network’s landing
party in the Philippines. The system will connect Malaysia,
Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Guam,
Hawaii and California.
The construction of AAG will enable the
Philippines to meet the expected growth in the country’s
international bandwidth requirements to support cutting-edge
broadband applications such as IP-based data, video and other
multimedia services.
The AAG would be built with the participation of
AT&T Inc., Bharti, BT Global Network Services, CAT Telecom,
Eastern Telecommunication Philippines Inc., PCP Co. Ltd., PT Indosat,
Saigon Postel Corp., StarHub, Telekom Malaysia, Telkom Indonesia,
Telstra, the government of Brunei Darussalam, TNZL, Viettel and VNPT.
The AAG is expected to carry 130,000
simultaneous high-definition television (HDTV) signals.
Eric R. Alberto, PLDT’s customer sales and
marketing group head, said that the AAG project will boost the
company’s Internet and business-process outsourcing ventures.
“We expect in two years of at least one
million subscribers,” he said.
“The [AAG] is not a conventional cable
network. It has been conceived to provide state-of-the-art
technology, routing options, render diversity to traditional routes
and help improve network resiliency via cost-effective way,” Ramon
Fernandez, head of PLDT’s international and carrier business
group, said.
The AAG will also provide added protection from
disruptions such as the 2006 earthquake, which caused massive
service interruptions of telecommunications services to corporate
and retail customers across the region.
The AAG project, which is expected to carry
international traffic early next year, will also provide for future
connectivity that can be extended to Australia, India , Africa and
Europe.
-- Darwin G. Amojelar
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