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Facebook signs on for Malaysia cable

Putting the social into a new network

Facebook has emerged as an investor in the Asia Pacific Gateway submarine cable project, being built to link eight countries in the region.

The investment by The Social NetworkTM emerged in a stock exchange announcement by Malaysian ISP, Time dotCom, which has become the latest investor in the under-construction cable system.

China Telecom is also investing in the project, which is due to begin construction this year for completion in 2014. The 10,000 km APG system will link Malaysia to Korea and Japan, with branches to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore.

Saiful Husni, CEO of Time dotCom subsidiary Global Transit (which has signed the construction and maintenance agreement for the cable) emphasized the need for Malaysia to have an alternative gateway to Singapore for international traffic.

In this media release, Husni notes that a global landing system into Malaysia “lowers our dependencies on Singapore as the main gateway for Internet traffic. We can now channel high volumes of this traffic on our network with the lowest latency, directly to the US.”

Australian telco newsletter Communications Day says the 3.4 Tbps that Time dotCom’s $US45 million investment in the cable brings (a figure that includes construction of a data centre) would suggest that Facebook intends to end up with multiple terabits of pan-Asian capacity. The investment also opens up the prospect of Facebook putting dollars into data centres in the region. ®

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