MANILA,Philippines--Philippine Long Distance Telephone Corp. has signed up for a regional consortium of telecommunication giants that plans to build an international undersea cable system within the Asia Pacific Region by 2011.

The other participating telcos are Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan), China Telecom (China Mainland), China Unicom (China Mainland), KT Corporation (Korea), NTT Communications (Japan), Telekom Malaysia (Malaysia) and VNPT (Vietnam).

PLDT disclosed to the Philippine Stock Exchange that the proposed undersea cable system would be called the Asia - Pacific Gateway (APG) and was planned to connect Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, China Mainland, Japan and Korea.

The proposed Asia Pacific Gateway seeks to provide additional capacity for growing demand and an alternative, diverse routing within the region such that it will avoid some of the areas most prone to seismic activity, conditions which are hazardous to undersea cables.

The cable system will span about 8,000 kilometers and will use the latest Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technologies with a minimum design capacity of 4 Terabit/s.

“The planning and eventual implementation of the new Asia Pacific Gateway project is timely due to the growing bandwidth demand of PLDT and the other proponents. It is also intended to meet the requirements for cable route diversity, protection, and to provide capacity to replace the retiring cables in the region,” said Alejandro Caeg, PLDT First Vice President, International & Carrier Business Group.

The proposed cable system has the potential to provide an alternative route and/or restoration paths to existing cable systems in the region as it is designed to provide a high degree of inter-connectivity with existing and planned high bandwidth systems.