People living in Sarawak can look forward to an improved internet surfing experience with the launch of a new submarine cable and data centre. Dubbed the Batam Sarawak internet cable system (Basics), the cable connects the state to Singapore via the Indonesian city.
According to The Star, the launch happened earlier today, and was officiated by the state’s Utility and Telecommunications Minister Julaihi Narawi. The minister says that the new infrastructure would improve internet connectivity in Sarawak, especially in rural areas. The report quotes him as saying that “with this infrastructure, latency issues like ‘hanging’ and being unable to connect will be a thing of the past”.
The minister also says the facilities were in line with the Sarawak state government’s plan to become a high-income economy by the year 2030. Said facilities were privately developed by PP Telecommunications Sdn Bhd (PPTEL), a Kuching-based company, under its new corporate identity, irix. The company also signed a corporate partnership agreement with Sarawak Information Systems Sdn Bhd (Sains) on utilising the infrastructure.
Jonathan Smith, CEO of PPTEL, says that the 700km submarine cable consists of six fibre pairs with 80 wavelengths of 100Gbps transmission capacity each. This brings the total system capacity to 48Tbps. As for the data centre, which is located in Santubong, serves as the landing point for Basics into Sarawak. It is also the first data centre in the country to be certified as Tier IV by the Uptime Institute. This tier means that the data centre has a lot of redundancies, minimising downtime when a component fails.
Back in March, Communications and Multimedia Minister Annuar Musa said that Malaysia is working on constructing four new undersea cables to help meet the network needs of the country. Two of them are expected to be completed by the end of this year, and one of those two is Basics.
(Source: The Star, Uptime Institute)
