Pacnet Announces Largest Ever Capacity Upgrade

SINGAPORE, — Pacnet today announced plans to accelerate upgrades on its wholly-owned subsea cable network EAC-C2C, adding an additional 3,600 Gbps of capacity across Asia to meet the region’s growing demand for bandwidth.

“We are seeing bandwidth demand in the region fueled not only by the expanding broadband population in Asia, but also from the growing amount of digital content that is being generated from Asia,” said Bill Barney, Chief Executive Officer of Pacnet. “We are now bringing forward our upgrade schedule by three months, and delivering Pacnet’s largest capacity upgrade to-date, so as to enable us to meet this demand.”

“The global economic crisis has done little to mute the demand for intra- Asian submarine cable capacity,” said TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin. According to TeleGeography, demand for intra-Asia capacity is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 48 percent between 2009 and 2015. “Pacnet’s investment in capacity upgrades is vital to meet the expanding capacity requirements in the region,” he added.

“The projected increase in lit capacity requirements within the region will be driven by massive uptake of bandwidth-hungry applications such as video, the growing popularity of cloud computing and the rise of industry- specific requirements such as redundant, ultra-low latency connectivity demanded by stock exchanges and financial institutions,” said Wilfred Kwan, Chief Technology Officer of Pacnet.

“Our latest network upgrades, which are targeted for completion by early 2011, will focus on increasing capacity across key network routes which connect Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, countries that are host to some of Asia’s largest enterprises and busiest stock exchanges,” added Mr Kwan.

Alongside upgrades to its submarine cable network, Pacnet will also be upgrading its terrestrial backhaul links between cable landing stations and its Points of Presence, delivering city-to-city high-bandwidth connectivity around the region.

EAC-C2C utilizes the latest ASON (Automatically Switched Optical Network) technology which supports meshed protection on the optical layer, auto- provisioning and optimized routing of traffic. Coupled with at least two landing points into all locations, EAC-C2C provides industry-leading network resiliency and route diversity required to run mission-critical business applications. As part of the latest upgrades, Differential Phase Shift Keying (DPSK) technology, which will enable more efficient data transmission over long haul networks, will also be deployed.

Earlier in April this year, Pacnet completed a phase of upgrades that saw 3,200 Gbps of capacity added to EAC-C2C. – Pacnet