Singapore – A consortium comprising major Asian telecommunications companies have agreed to jointly plan and develop a proposal to build the Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG), an international submarine cable system in the Asia Pacific region. The list of major telcos in the APG consortium include StarHub (Singapore), Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan), China Telecom (Mainland China), China Unicom (Mainland China), KT Corporation (Korea), NTT Communications (Japan), PLDT (the Philippines), Telekom Malaysia (Malaysia) and VNPT (Vietnam). The cable system will span 8,000 kilometres across the region linking eight countries, namely Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Mainland China, Japan and Korea. The APG will use the latest Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing technology with a minimum design capacity of 4 terabits per second of data bandwidth that will provide additional bandwidth capacity to the carriers. Besides the additional bandwidth capacity, the APG will also provide seamless connectivity to key north Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan.