China Netcom agreed to sell all of its Asia Netcom assets to an investor group led by Ashmore Emerging Markets Liquid Investment Portfolio and also including Spinnaker Global Opportunity Fund Limited and Clearwater Capital Partners, for approximately US$402 million. Completion of the deal is conditioned on regulatory approvals.
Since China Netcom purchased the former Asia Global Crossing and launched Asia Netcom in 2003, the company has emerged as a top regional provider of IP- based communications solutions. It operates a subsea cable system, EAC, as well as extensive terrestrial backhauls and telehouses, that serves key Asian markets. http://www.asianetcom.com
- In March 2006, Asia Netcom completed a major network upgrade that will bring a 50% increase in lit capacity to its pan-Asia submarine cable systems, EAC. As part of the upgrade, 10 Gbps was lit up on each of EAC’s four fiber pairs, effectively adding 40 Gbps of new bandwidth to EAC’s existing 80 Gbps. The EAC system spans 19,500 km within Asia connecting Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong and soon, China.
- In January 2006, Asia Netcom selected Lucent Technologies to upgrade its pan-Asian submarine cable network, known as EAC. Lucent will replace EAC’s existing platform with the Lucent LambdaUnite Multi-Service Switch (MSS). With the LambdaUnite MSS platform and its support for ASON (Automatically Switched Optical Networks)/GMPLS (Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching) technology, Asia Netcom will be able to adopt a meshed, network architecture on the optical layer, and offer a wide variety of “Class-of-Service” options as part of its optical transport services.