Telecommunications company PLDT on Wednesday secured the provisional authority to build two new cable landing stations on the Pacific side of the Philippine Sea for its "Apricot cable system." In a statement, PLDT said the provisional authority was issued by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), with the cable landing facilities targeted to be completed by 'early 2025.' 'The construction of the cable landing stations in Baler, Aurora in the North East, and in Digos, Davao in the Southern coastal borders of the country provide telco carriers new alternate routes which do not traverse the usual West Philippine Sea waters,' it said. These facilities, it said, will improve PLDT's existing network to deliver higher speeds and lower latency connectivity as well as add resilience to its existing landing stations in Batangas, La Union and Daet. Once completed, the Apricot cable system will boost PLDT's total international capacity to 140 Terabits per second (Tbps). 'The 12,000-kilometer-long cable system will connect the Philippines, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Guam,' it said. As of end-March 2023, PLDT had expanded its total fiber footprint to over 1.1 million kilometers, consisting of over 231,000 kilometers of international fiber and over 874,000 kilometers of domestic fiber

Source: Philippines News Agency