Facebook Invests In APAC Undersea Cable

In order to grab more users in Asia, Facebook has decided to go beyond limits. The social networking giant has reportedly invested in a 10,000km (6,214 mile) undersea cable project to help boost internet speed and make it available to almost a dozen Asia-Pacific countries.

The Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) project, which was finalized last year in December, is working to develop a huge underwater cable that will run directly from Malaysia to South Korea and Japan. The network will also cover other countries including Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Facebook believes that this move will eventually increase membership, and the company considers Asia as one of its fastest growing markets.

“Our investment in this cable will help support our growth in South Asia, making it possible for us to provide a better user experience for a greater number of Facebook users in countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore,” a spokesman said.

However, he hasn’t talked about how much money the company was putting into scheme, saying only that a consortium of firms made an investment of $450 in total.

The project received massive funding from two large Chinese firms; China Telecom and China Unicom.

With the installation of fiber-optic cable in Asia, people living in these countries can send and receive data more speedily to North America, consortium leader Time Dotcom said.

The Chief Executive Saiful Husni said that this move will reduce their dependencies on Singapore, the only main gateway for internet traffic.

“We can now channel high volumes of this traffic on our network with the lowest latency [access time], directly to the US.”

Facebook is not the first major US internet company that invested heavily on improving the web infrastructure.

Back in 2008, Google said that it would make an investment of $300 million in underwater cabling system known as Unity between Asia and the U.S.