This news struck me as a surprise, and was relatively quietly announced - I didn’t get to know about it until someone told me recently.

Apparently, TM is the lead player in a consortium to implement an Asia-US submarine cable, formed by AT&T Inc. (USA), Bharti AirTel (India), Government of Brunei Darussalam (Brunei), British Telecom Global Network Services (UK), CAT Telekom (Thailand), Eastern Telecommunications Philippines Inc. (Philippines), Indosat (Indonesia), Pacific Communications Pte Ltd (Cambodia), Philippines Long Distance Telephone Co. (Philippines), PT Telkom (Indonesia), Saigon Postal Corporation (Vietnam), StarHub (Singapore), Telstra (Australia), Telecom New Zealand International (New Zealand), Viettel (Vietnam) and Vietnam Post & Telecommunications Group of Vietnam (Vietnam).

The cable is called the AAG, or Asia America Gateway. The AAG will provide a seamless direct link between the US and other Asian countries via one single cable. It also has the ability to be expanded to Australia, India, Africa, and Europe. Spanning over 20,000 km, AAG will link Malaysia to the US via Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and the West coast of the US. The cable system is designed to provide a capacity of up to 1.92 Terabits per second of data bandwidth.
It will have an initial capacity of 480Gbps.

TM holds 9% in the equity of the project (majority shareholder). The contract is worth approximately $US500 Million. (Which means TM’s 9% equity is $US45 million / RM157million).

A quote from CEO, Datuk Abdul Wahid Omar: “While we are present in 13 countries in the region and involved in seven existing major submarine cable consortiums, this initiative is still one of the biggest we have undertaken. It will provide TM with additional 60Gbps of capacity, which will help reduce any future potential congestion we may face.”

Another quote: As the AAG is from a single cable network, not only will it have improvements in lowering latency, it will also simultaneously ramp up the international bandwidth capacity to Malaysia at more competitive costs.”

“This impressive joint-effort will go a long way in increasing broadband uptake in this region, which will in turn increase the overall appeal for global investments and increase the competitiveness of the countries benefiting from direct links to the Asia-America Gateway,”

Analysis: Assuming this goes well, Malaysia will surpass Singapore and Thailand in being a regional hub. That means, just like how Malacca was a hub for international trade in the days of yore, Malaysia could be come a hub for international traffic.

Congratulations TM! Let’s hope this happens soon, and that we can see some speed improvements by early next year. My internet connection is getting slower as of late…and from the news article, this project is scheduled to be completed only by December 2008…

You can read more here, on IT Wire, or on TM’s press release section on its official website.

Since this is a relatively short article, I’m pasting the whole thing in. Certain parts have been bolded for emphasis. Read further on to find out what this could mean for us Malaysians. This article is from the Business Times. Thanks to Paul Tan� for the article tip!

Read below:

MALAYSIA is now a step closer to becoming a regional Internet hub, thanks to the partnership between Telekom Malaysia Bhd ™ and Verizon Business.

TM and the US phone firm signed an initial pact to set up a centre in Cyberjaya, which could be jointly operated.

The centre would help attract giant content developers like Google or Yahoo! to host its websites in Malaysia.

For TM, the setting up of the local Internet hub could help save costs “significantly”, said group chief executive officer Datuk Abdul Wahid Omar.

For local Internet surfers, they would be able to open local websites faster and see an improvement in download speed.

“The memorandum of understanding will provide an impetus for Malaysia to become a regional transit hub for global Internet service providers routing traffic.

“In fact, our current Internet traffic in and out of Malaysia is already one of the highest in the region, exceeding some of our more established neighbours,” said Abdul Wahid, who represented TM at the signing ceremony. Representing Verizon Business was its vice president for strategy and finance John Doherty.

Conclusions

In summary, this is good news, for the future. Personally I’m surprised that TM is open to working with a foreign provider. One of the more interesting lines is that Malaysia can become a “regional transit hub for global Internet service providers routing traffic” - this means our packets don’t need to travel from US, to Hong Kong, then to Singapore, then here. Yay! This is perhaps, the most visible benefit so far from the novation of internet services from TMNet, to the parent company TM. (Its doubtful that TM Net would be able to tie up with Verizon). But keep in mind that this is only PLANNED. The word “impetus” basically means potential. Which means that it only means that with this, Malaysia has the potential to become a hub.

The more immediate benefit is merely being able to access local websites faster. Yes, just Malaysian sites. Good news for technopreneurs like myself, and to extent certain internet users who mainly view local content. While I hope that goes through well, I really think the international links (the way Malaysia’s connected to the rest of the world) more than anything else need more attention.

Here’s also the link to the site for Verizon Business Malaysia. Notice the contradiction though - the news report from Business Times says “The centre would help attract giant content developers like Google or Yahoo! to host its websites in Malaysia. ” However, the Verizon Business Malaysia website says ” Verizon Business offers access to its services to non-US based carriers and customers, subject to legal and regulatory requirements and network availability.” So does this mean that the “Google & Yahoo” reference is wrong? (Yes, Yahoo and Google are US based companies, if you didn’t know already).

It remains to be seen though whether TM’s incompetence will infect or hinder its foreign partner…

But congratulations, TM. It’s a good step. You’ve proven yourself better than some other local GLCs who have been shuffling their feet on foreign tieups which would obviously benefit them, due to having misguided notions of nationalism (Proton with Volkswagen, for instance). This is a good move - like DiGi with Telenor, like Celcom with Vodafone.

TM - as the current monopolistic provider of whom we Malaysians have no choice but to use, its nice to see you actually getting better (which would make supporting your monopoly kind of worth it if you could do the whole “smart thinking” and “good service” thing regularly)!

Here’s a pat on the back. Now, back to work. I’ll like to talk you regarding my bandwidth being throttled…

“Our goal is to get thousands of hotspots operators worldwide connected under this Yellowspots platform and enabling millions of subscribers to truly go mobile anywhere, any time,” said Palette chief executive office Eg Kah Yee.

Read the full article at The Edge Daily.