PLDT will go live with Asia Direct Cable this Q1
PLDT Inc. will start providing services through a fiber optic submarine cable system that spans about 10,000 kilometers across Asia within this first quarter of 2025—a move that is seen to support the growing data requirements of consumers and enterprises.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Manuel Pangilinan-led telco said that the Asia Direct Cable (ADC) system is slated to provide service soon across East and Southeast Asia.
From the Philippines, ADC will be connected to Tuas, Singapore; Chung Hom Kok, Hong Kong; Maruyama, Japan; Quy Nhon, Vietnam; Sri Racha, Thailand; and Shantou, China.
The submarine cable is owned by the ADC Consortium comprised of PLDT, China Telecom, China Unicom, National Telecom (or NT of Thailand), Singtel, SoftBank Corp., Tata Communications and Viettel Group.
Built by NEC Corp. of Japan, the ADC started commercial operations last Dec. 19. The cable stretches from Tuas in Singapore to Maruyama in Japan. The Philippines is linked through a landing site in Batangas.
“As we fortify our investments in our international submarine cable systems like the ADC, we empower businesses, enhance content access for consumers, drive economic growth, support the government’s digitalization efforts, and position the country as a strategic hyperscale hub in Asia-Pacific,” said, Jojo Gendrano, senior vice president and head of enterprise business at PLDT.
“Hyperscalers” are entities providing cloud, networking and internet services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Alibaba AliCloud, IBM and Oracle.
The PLDT Group tripled its international capacity to 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) when it activated the US-Transpacific Jupiter cable system in July 2022. The 14,000-km cable system links a landing station in Daet, Camarines Norte and Japan.
With the ADC going live, the telco giant will scale up its capacity to 100 Tbps. PLDT previously set the goal of establishing data capacity of 1,000 terabit by 2028.
