The ADC Consortium recently celebrated the inauguration of the Asia Direct Cable (ADC), an ambitious project that saw NEC both manufacture and install the cable that is approximately 10,000 km long.

Per press releases and multiple industry reports, the ADC connects several key locations across East and Southeast Asia, including China (Hong Kong SAR and Guangdong Province), Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. ADC has multiple pairs of high-capacity optical fibers and is designed to carry more than 160 Tbps of traffic, enabling high-capacity transmission of data across the East and Southeast Asian regions.

“This new cable marks a significant milestone, providing a vital foundation to support the ever-growing communications needs of Asia and the world,” said Koji Ishii, MC Co-Chairperson of the ADC Consortium. “The milestone represents the culmination of our efforts to overcome numerous challenges, made possible through steadfast collaboration and partnerships with esteemed stakeholders from various countries, including NEC. We are confident that this cable system will significantly contribute to the development of the AI industry in the Asia region.”

“NEC has earned the trust of its clients, and the consortium is extremely satisfied with the successful completion of this cable,” said Billy Li, MC Co-Chairperson of the ADC Consortium. “It offers the greatest cable capacity and essential diversity required for Asia’s major information hubs, enabling telecom carriers and service providers to optimize their network and service planning for sustainable growth.”

“NEC is honored to have taken part in this prestigious project, which will support increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications driven by technological advancements in 5G, the cloud, the Internet-of-Things and Artificial Intelligence,” NEC Corporation Senior Vice President Tomonori Uematsu said in a press release. “We thank the consortium for their partnership and for helping us to push the boundaries of numerous challenges to bring this project to fruition.”

NEC has been a leading supplier of submarine cable systems for more than 60 years, and has built more than 400,000 km of cable, spanning the earth nearly 10 times. NEC’s subsidiary OCC Corporation manufactures optical submarine cables capable of withstanding water pressures at ocean depths beyond 8,000 meters.

The ADC Consortium includes leading communications and technology companies NT (Thailand), China Telecom, China Unicom, PLDT Inc., Singtel, SoftBank Corp., Tata Communications and Viettel.