NEC to construct SEA-US cable system

NEC to construct SEA-US cable system

Hawaiian Telcom announces that it has partnered with NEC, and others, to deliver a 20Tb/s 15,000km long cable system. This will link the continental US to Hawaii, and then onwards via Guam to Indonesia and the Philippines.

The cable will provide support for the predicted traffic growth on the trans-Pacific routes between South-East Asia and the US. It provides capacity direct to areas which previously had to transit via hubs in Singapore, Hong Kong or further afield.

Hawaiian will also benefit directly with the added capacity to the US. Being almost exhausted this  is leading instead to higher prices for bandwidth to the islands.

“SEA-US enables us to cost-effectively meet our future bandwidth growth requirements and substantially lower our incremental cost of trans-Pacific IP transit capacity by participating as an owner and operator, rather than just a capacity purchaser. Our investment in this cable will provide the dual benefit of making valuable capacity available to our carriers and enterprise customers and supports our internal growth with faster and more technologically advanced connectivity.” – Eric K. Yeaman, President and CEO, Hawaiian Telcom

Other partners in the venture are RTI, who will offer their knowledge of sub-sea cable systems, Telin (Telekomunikasi Indonesia International), Globe Telecom of the Philippines, and GTA supporting the island of Guam. The total cost of the cable system is $250mn, with Hawaiian providing 10% of this.
John Dixon

John Dixon is the Principal Consultant of thirteen-ten nanometre networks Ltd, based in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. He has a wide range of experience, (including, but not limited to) operating, designing and optimizing systems and networks for customers from global to domestic in scale. He has worked with many international brands to implement both data centres and wide-area networks across a range of industries. He is currently supporting a major SD-WAN vendor on the implementation of an environment supporting a major global fast-food chain.

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