The Zone

This piece of important news might be a little late but hey, better late than never. If you didn't already hear about it, TM (formerly known as TM Net) recently announced that its ploughing US$50 million (~RM175 million) in a massive project to build a undersea fiber optic cable from SEA all the way to the US. The entire project will actually take about US$500 million (~RM1.75 billion) and quite a few SEA telecommunications companies such as from Indonesia, Thailand and India are sharing the cost.

It is said that the main reason for the cable is SEA telecommunication companies are hoping to avoid the recurrence of last year's Taiwan earthquake debacle. If you don't remember, the quake pretty much severed most SEA countries from the Internet for several weeks. The new cable expected to be ready in late 2008, will bypass the quake and volcano prone North Asia, and we should have nothing to worry about if any quake hits or volcano erupts in the future.

More importantly though, TM said that it's data capacity will go up from 60Gbps to 75Gbps when the cable is ready. Will this mean faster broadband speeds for everyone? 2Mbps speeds (or more) for the home? TM says its possible but we'll wait and see on this one. The new cable will surely create excess bandwidth and we hope that TM will deliver on that promise. At the very least, we just hope that we will be able to finally get the true speeds that we subscribed to. 

Original link here (via The Star)