PROMISING START TO FIBRE-HIGHWAY PROJECT

TCC Technology has joined hand with three business partners in Vietnam, Hong Kong and Cambodia to set up the Thailand- Hong Kong Fiber Highway project to support large businesses. 

Kosit Suksingha, managing director of TCCT, said the idea took off a couple of years ago to join hands with Donghwa Telecom, based in Hong Kong, Neocom from Cambodia and Vietnam Telecom International (VTI) to set up the Thailand- Hong Kong Fibre Highway project, which has a speed capacity of 40 Gigabits per second and has fibre optic distance of about 1,600 kilometres, extending from Thailand to Hong Kong via Cambodia and Vietnam. 

The project started to provide international transmission and Internet Gateway services to network operators, Internet Service Provider (ISP) and enterprise businesses in January this year. TCCT has invested about Bt100 million to set up and participate in the project.

The venture provides international transmission including data transmission and Internet connection as well as international Internet gateway (IIG) connecting Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Hong Kong’s local international exchanges or National Internet Exchange (NIXs). 

Ying Ming Wu, general manager of Donghwa Telecom said that the fibre highway project will be one network across four regions from East Thailand to Cambodia, Vietnam and Hong Kong and use only one network platform. Each partner can see the outage at the same time and fix its short period. The network also combines both sea cable and terrestrial fibre as the Mekong area may encounter huge storms and flooding. It has also set up one network to serve the Mekong area. 

Nguyen Viet Thang from the Vietnam Telecom International (VTI) said that the fibre network system “Thailand-Hong Kong”, linking Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and via the international gateway in Hong Kong will connect to other regions such as Europe and North America. This fibre gateway can help reduce the distance between these locations and conveniently provide international Internet, data, and voice services to customers. 

“I think this venture marks an important point for the strategic business cooperation between the four companies and will be further developed,” he said. 

Kelvin Kwok, CEO of Neocom, said that the project is the first southeast fibre highway that is able to provide one-stop shop monitoring, which has a master-monitoring based in Hong Kong. 

“Cambodia is a developing country. We do not have a lot of experts in telecommunication. With this arrangement, it will reduce the gap between Cambodia and other Tier 1 telecom operators in the world,” said Kwok.

Kosit also said that Asean will become more solid with the backbone connection that will allow people to connect to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong’s local exchanges or the National Internet Exchange (NIXs). In the future, the corporation will connect the backbone to all Asean countries and the Mekong region via Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) to the global network. 

“The project will enable Thailand to become an outsourcing Internet Protocol (IP) and content distributor in Asean. This will augment the country’s competitiveness. Meanwhile, the company will expand its business in Cambodia this year by setting up data centres to support customers. Next year, it will set up the data centre in Vietnam to expand its business base,” said Kosit.