ADC consortium taps NEC for new subsea cable project

Asia Direct Cable (ADC) consortium is building a submarine cable connecting China, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

To that end, the consortium has selected NEC for the 9,400-kilometre long ADC cable.

According to NEC, the project should wrap up by the fourth quarter of 2022.

The cable will feature multiple pairs of high capacity optical fibers designed to carry more than 140 Tbps of traffic.

This should enable high capacity transmission of data across the East and Southeast Asian regions.

ADC’s high capacity also allows it to support increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications which are driven by technological advancements in 5G, the cloud, the Internet-of-Things and Artificial Intelligence.

Chang Weiguo, one of the ADC co-chairs from China Telecom, said:

“The ADC system provides the highest cable capacity and necessary diversity for Asia’s key information hubs.

“It will enable carriers and service providers to better plan their networks and services for a sustainable development.”

ADC Co-Chair, Mr. Koji Ishii of SoftBank also said,

“This new system will contribute to drive the Asian ICT business growth as one of the core infrastructure in the region and to meet the evolving marketplace.

“As a leading submarine cable system vendor, NEC has successfully provided many trans-Asia submarine cable systems, making the company the most reliable choice for the ADC supply partner.”