DIGITAL services provider PLDT Inc. is investing an additional $10 million (P535.22 million) to increase its capacity in an international fiber-optic cable that runs across Asia, Africa and Europe, helping the company to provide better services to its customers.
Eric R. Alberto, the company’s chief revenue officer, said the group is beefing up its capacity in the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) Cable System through an additional investment of about P500 million into the telco consortium-operated facility.
“We bought capacities in the AAE-1, which is stretching out to connect to the Middle East and the Europe terminal building station, which is in France,” he said in a chance interview. “This is going live within the year.”
Global fiber-optic cable systems like the AAE-1 help telcos increase their international bandwidth while raising the resiliency of their overseas links, thereby enhancing the quality of data and Internet connection of users.
The facility in particular is a 25,000-kilometer undersea cable network system that will connect Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and Europe. It uses 100 Gigabits per second technology with a minimum capacity use of 10 Gbps.
It connects the Philippines to 17 international destinations, namely France, Greece, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, Djibouti, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Hong Kong.
Connecting to an international cable link allows telcos to offer customers bandwidth-heavy broadband applications that require international access, such as IP-based data, external video content and other multimedia services.