News
The South Korean operator has today revealed plans to build a new submarine cable, set to link six countries in East and Southeast Asia
Today, KT has announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with real estate consulting firm Savills to build a new submarine cable system for the Asia Pacific region.
Savill’s will reportedly conduct asset management duties, such as contracting, licensing, and attracting investors, while KT will take the lead on the construction and operation of the new cable network.
The system itself will reportedly span around 9,000km, linking South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines.
KT already owns stakes in both the Asia Pacific Gateway and New Cross Pacific Cable System, which both link to South Korea via Busan on the peninsula’s south coast. Where this new cable system will be landed has yet to be announced.
When it comes to motivation for this cable’s construction, KT cites the booming demand for cloud and so-called over-the-top (OTT) services, like video streaming.
"Demand derived from services such as digital transformation-based cloud services and OTT falls upon not only South Korea, but the entire Asian region and submarine cable industry is anticipated to expand even further," KT’s enterprise division head Shin Soo-jung.
The OTT market is expected to grow to $1,039 billion by 2027.
Want to learn all of the latest news from the submarine cable industry? Join the experts in discussion at this year’s live Submarine Networks EMEA conference
Also in the news:
BT scraps DAZN talks as it lines up sports streaming JV with Discovery
Is ‘Buy American’ too tall an order for US telcos?
STC carving out data centre and subsea cables into new unit
