Telekeom Malaysia (TM) has secured a 20-year contract to help construct, deploy and manage a new subsea cable system for the nation.
The Sistem Kabel Rakyat 1 Malaysia (SKR1M) is designed to link Peninsular Malaysia with Sabah and Sarawak. It is an initiative of the Malaysian government as part of efforts to increase the capacity of high-speed broadband.
The two fiber pair system will use 100Gbps technology to deliver an initial capacity of 4Tbps, upgradeable to at least 12.8Tbps.
The cable will have a total length of around 3,500km, and is expected to begin carrying commercial traffic by mid-2017.
TM has been contracted to work closely with TIME dotCom subsidiary TT dotcom to construct, operate and maintain the network for the lifetime of the cable system.
“The SKR1M cable system development is also in line with the efforts to replace TM’s aging Malaysian Domestic Submarine Cable System (MDSCS) which has been in service since 1995,” TM executive vice president for global and wholesale Rozaimy Abd Rahman commented.
“Currently, MDSCS is already carrying 400Gbps, slightly over 10% of the new SKR1M initial equipage and is facing technological obsolescence, thus limiting its capability to support the growing domestic capacity demand.”
TM owns over a dozen subsea cable systems spanning over 100,000 route miles, and is also a member of a number of subsea cable consortia.