New undersea cable to accelerate data transfer by 70pc as forecasts suggest 21m more Chinese online by 2008
Asia Netcom is investing up to US$35 million on an undersea cable linking South Korea with Qingdao in Shandong province as it sees an end to the Asian bandwidth glut driven partly by China's surging internet traffic.
William Barney, the president of China Netcom Communications Group Corp (Hong Kong)'s undersea cable unit, said broadband expansion in the mainland next year would be fuelled by bandwidth-consuming new applications such as internet protocol television, high-definition television and 3G multimedia services.
Mr Barney predicts this will lead to international bandwidth wholesale pricing picking up in 2007.
'Wholesale assets have been put into mothballs for the last four years, but we see the market is coming back,' he said, adding that the company's focus would be switching from India to China over the next two years.
Asia Netcom owns a cable linking Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. Mr Barney said the 350km Korea-Qingdao extension would have a capacity of 40 gigabytes, which could be upgraded to 2.5 terabytes, depending on demand.
The new cable will speed up internet traffic between Korea and Beijing by 70 per cent.