Converge's subsea cables spare Filipinos from internet outage

Converge CEO and co-founder Dennis Anthony Uy yesterday said the provider immediately brought back internet services when a submarine link to Singapore was cut last Friday.

Uy said Converge rerouted data traffic through its Bifrost Cable System, a project that goes to Guam, Indonesia, Singapore and the US through the Celebes Sea and Java Sea.

Bifrost extends for around 20,000 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean. It is designed to transmit data among parties by 240 terabits per second, landing in the Philippines via Davao.

Apart from this, Uy said Converge relied on the Southeast Asia-Hainan-Hong Kong Express Cable System for redundancy. SEA-H2X lands in the country via La Union.

SEA-H2X crosses more than 6,000 kilometers of waters between China and Southeast Asia, with the capacity to transfer over 200 Tbps across China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

“We planned our investments in these international cable systems as early as five years ago precisely in anticipation of these incidents,” Uy said.

“Our investments in Bifrost, along with the SEA-H2X, allowed us to achieve international network redundancy that’s most important at a time like this,” he added.

Last week, the University of the Philippines Diliman Network Helpdesk flagged erratic access to its information pipelines. The desk attributed the downtime to a fiber cut in one of the submarine cables to Singapore, where its data are hosted.

Subsea links like Bifrost act as passageways for data transmission between and among countries, so telcos invest on them to expedite internet traffic and strengthen infrastructure redundancy.

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