Arroyo inaugurates RP leg of $550-M cable network project

BAUANG, La Union – To ensure a faster, smoother and trouble-free telecommunications connection in the country, the government on Tuesday inaugurated the Philippine leg of the $550-million, 20,000-kilometer Asia-America Gateway (AAG) fiber cable network project here. President Gloria Arroyo, who was present during the event, called the occasion a "milestone in the country's telecommunication industry." “The IT companies can breathe easier now. Our call centers cannot afford a few seconds of redundancy,” she said, referring to the booming outsourcing industry that has been providing millions of job opportunities to Filipinos. During the inauguration, President Arroyo pulled the cable and hauled in the symbolic "partnership buoy" that would link Malaysia to the United States via Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and the US West Coast through an undersea cable system. Telecoms industry leaders from Asia and the US forged the agreement in Kuala Lumpur last April 2007 to forge the AAG. The submarine cable is designed to provide 1.92 terabit per second using dense wavelength division multiplexing telecommunication. In the future, this bandwidth is expected to support about 130,000 simultaneous high definition TV signals. La Union Rep. Tomas "Butch" Dumpit said that the AAG is a big boost to our globalization outsourcing industries, some of which are located in Northern Luzon. "It's a big and ambitious process which we hope would bring in progress and development in the country," Dumpit said. The project hopes to prevent the 2006 Taiwan earthquake disruption by not passing through the traditional Trans-Pacific routes of the North Pacific which is prone to seismic activities. The AAG network is owned by a consortium formed by 10 parties including the Government of Brunei, Telstra (Australia), AT&T (USA), Bharti (India), CAT (Thailand), PLDT (Philippines), PT Telkom (Indonesia), Telekom Malaysia (Malaysia), StarHub (Singapore) and VNPT (Vietnam). - GMANews.TV