Faster & Better Green Fat Cables

Video streaming from YouTube and access to other sites in the United States will be smoother and less prone to disruption for StarHub users when a new undersea cable system starts operations next month.

The US$500 million Asia-America Gateway (AAG) will increase the Singapore telco's overseas Internet bandwidth by 30 per cent and is designed to provide a capacity of up to 1.92 Terabits per second of bandwidth.

Built over three years by StarHub and a consortium of 18 other telcos, including America's AT&T and Malaysia's Telekom Malaysia, the cable system stretches 20,000km from the eastern part of Singapore to the Philippines, then directly across the Pacific Ocean to the US.

The cable system avoids the "volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring" - which existing Internet submarine cables connecting Singapore to the world run through - which is prone to earthquakes and other natural disasters that could damage the cables. Damage to submarine cables in that region in 2006, when a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck off Taiwan, cut off Internet connectivity between Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. Online economic activity in the region ground to a near halt. Traffic was re-routed through other cables, but it took almost two months to restore full capacity.

While StarHub has invested in other submarine cables, it will route most of its current network capacity to the AAG. As the AAG offers a more direct route to the US, through fewer routers, access to US-based Internet websites, the main online destination, will be quicker.

Industry analyst said that the AAG's increased bandwidth would not necessarily translate into a vast improvement in broadband speeds. The bottleneck in Internet traffic for users here mostly occurs within Singapore itself, not in cables linking Singapore to overseas.

Another submarine Internet cable to the US, being built by SingTel, PacNet, Google and other telcos, is expected to be ready in the first quarter of next year.