Superloop aims to boost Hong Kong’s role as regional data centre hub with submarine cable system

Infrastructure part of Australian network services provider’s US$34m high-capacity, 110 kilometre-long fibre optic network across the city

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Hong Kong’s Tseung Kwan O has 13 operational data centres – facilities run by Telstra’s Pacnet, NTT Communications, Towngas Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, HKColo Group and Japan’s KDDI Corp, and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing. Photo: AP

Published: 7:00am, 24 Jun 2017Updated: 10:00am, 24 Jun 2017

Australian telecommunications network services provider Superloop aims to help buttress Hong Kong’s position as a data centre hub in the Asia-Pacific, following its launch on Friday of the first fibre-optic submarine cable system to connect the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate and Chai Wan.

The high-capacity, 2.8-kilometre TKO Express cable system will help “enhance the competitiveness” of the city by meeting demand for a low-latency and fully diverse route between Hong Kong island and the industrial estate, where the market’s largest concentration of advanced data centres are located, said Superloop Hong Kong country manager Susana Halliday at a press conference on Friday.

“It provides an infrastructure ... that could possibly attract more customers to that area,” she said.

The new cable system has gone live ahead of a competing infrastructure, the 3km Ultra Express Link, that Hong Kong telecommunications giant HKT expects to start building in the second half of this year.

Tseung Kwan O has 13 operational data centres, including facilities run by Telstra’s Pacnet, NTT Communications, Towngas Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, HKColo Group and Japan’s KDDI Corp, and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.

Superloop’s Susana Halliday says that customers, especially those from the finance sector, would not accept a network with a single area of failure. Photo: Dickson Lee

It is also the site of the city’s largest data centre that is currently being built by SuneVision, the technology arm of property developer Sun Hung Kai Properties.