The new subsea cable directly links Singapore and other countries in Southeast Asia to the U.S. West Coast.
In a press release, Keppel Ltd. announced that the Bifrost Cable System has officially achieved Ready for Service (RFS) status and is now gearing up to begin commercial traffic in the coming weeks.
The 20,000-kilometer subsea cable is the world’s first underwater cable system directly linking Singapore to the west coast of USA via multiple countries through the Java Sea and Celebes Sea kn Indonesia.
Bifrost lands in Singapore, Guam, and Grover Beach, California, with branching units extending connectivity to Jakarta and Manado in Indonesia, Davao, Philippines, and Winema, Oregon in the USA.
The new cable system is engineered to support AI workloads, cloud-native platforms, and real-time digital services, offering a round-trip latency of just under 165 milliseconds between Singapore and the USA—up to 10 milliseconds faster than many existing systems.
The new route across the Pacific also introduces more than 260 Tbps of additional capacity and enhances the resiliency of one of the world’s most active digital corridors.
Converge Information and Communications Technology Solutions, Inc. is the landing party in the Philippines, as it secured an Indefeasible Right of Use (IRU) on the main trunk of this transpacific cable through a multi-billion peso agreement in 2021.
This agreement also designates Converge as the landing party for the Philippine branch of the cable, which terminates in Davao.
Dennis Anthony Uy, CEO of Converge, said, “The Philippines is in a prime location being in the centre of the region, so this critical digital infrastructure – the Bifrost Cable System – is envisioned to support the booming connectivity needs of the Asia-Pacific region and provide an important direct link with the US.“
He added, “This will not only boost the company’s international bandwidth capacity, but for the Philippines, it will mean redundancy and diversity in network infrastructure to power the country’s digital journeys.”
With the Bifrost system now live, Converge Global Business said that is “prepared to meet the increasing demand for high-capacity, low-latency connectivity throughout the Asia-Pacific region.”