Australian dark fibre connectivity and digital services provider Superloop has announced that the TKO Express, the only domestic submarine cable connecting Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate and Chai Wan in Hong Kong, is now live.
The Bevan Slattery founded Superloop says TKO Express is the world’s highest core count subsea cable ever deployed and constitutes a “unique and critical component of Superloop’s Hong Kong dark fibre network”.
Comprising 1,728 fibre cores, the cable provides the shortest and most direct link between Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate and Chai Wan, areas in which some of the most significant data centres in Hong Kong are located.
Successfully installed across the Tathong Channel, the eastern entrance to Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, in mid-February 2017, Superloop says TKO Express is the first “truly geographical diverse, low-latency path between the two locations, delivering connectivity that is reliable, secure and fast”.
{loadposition peter}The cable link is approximately 20 km shorter than alternate network routes linking Chai Wan and the data centre hub at Tseung Kwan O.
Bevan Slattery, Superloop executive chairman and CEO said “this opened new opportunities for businesses requiring high-speed connectivity or a geographically diverse link between the two precincts. Companies in the financial, telecommunications and media sectors, in particular, require high-performance, highly reliable connectivity for day-to-day business activities.”
“TKO Express is by far the most direct route linking the HKEX Hosting Services Datacenter with Hong Kong Island,” Slattery said.
“That’s important for financial institutions who rely on low-latency connectivity to the HKEX Hosting Services Datacenter for transactions that can be won or lost in milliseconds.”
Susana Halliday, Hong Kong country manager of Superloop and project leader for TKO Express said, “early in the design stage, our networks architects raised a critical problem with diverse connectivity to data centres within the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate, due geographical and physical constraints along Wan Po Road”.
“Many of our customers would not accept a network with a single area of failure, particularly those in the finance sector, so we developed an alternative solution with the TKO Express cable system, to provide a geographically separate route for this exceptionally important area.”
According to Halliday the full extent of how essential the TKO Express cable system is for improving network reliability in this area has become increasingly apparent since going live.
“Most of our customers rely on our network to ensure the success of their business, they have exceptionally high standards, and the positive feedback we have received on our network in Hong Kong has been extraordinary.”
The first phase of Superloop’s Hong Kong core network officially went live in December 2016. Encompassing 110 km, the network combines three campus loops - Chai Wan, Tseung Kwan O and Tsuen Wan - with diverse backbone links connecting the campuses.
Superloop has three harbour crossings connecting Hong Kong Island to Kowloon - Western Harbour Crossing, Eastern Harbour Crossing - and now the TKO Express cable system.
The network has been designed specifically for data transmission to ensure the shortest available path between key areas and full diversity.
Halliday says that, in anticipation of huge demand of bandwidth in the near future, the network is comprised of two 1,000 core cables, making it Superloop’s largest fibre core count deployment to date in the Asia Pacific region.