BUSAN ― KT has opened a network center here to manage superfast cross-border Internet traffic via the world’s biggest underwater cables, connecting South Korea with eight other Asian countries, on the sidelines of the ongoing International Telecommunications Union conference.

South Korea’s largest telecommunications company said Tuesday that the Asia Pacific Gateway Network Operation Center in Haeundae will be the control tower that also operates, maintains and fixes the cables whenever a problem arises.

KT has led a consortium of 13 companies ― including China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, NTT, StarHub and Facebook ― from nine locations to lay out the 11,000-kilometer-long cables 6,000 meters underwater. The nine are Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, whose Internet subscribers account for almost 70 percent of the total in Asia, and about 32 percent worldwide.

The consortium has completed about 70 percent of the APG cable construction with KT’s affiliate KT Submarine, which has special-purpose vessels to unroll the cables and maintain them. It will finish the 600 billion won ($570 million) project by the second half of next year.

KT CEO Hwang Chang-gyu said that the APG NOC, which has the capacity to manage data transmission at 38.4 terabits per second, will help the country become Asia’s telecommunications network hub.

“The underwater cables will accommodate the growing Internet traffic in Asia and spur ICT services,” Hwang said at the center’s launch event in line with the company’s “GiGAtopia” vision for fifth-generation communication technology.

The 38.4 Tbps capacity is equivalent to 5 million people watching high-definition content simultaneously, and it can allow consumers to send 7,000 movies each with 700 megabytes.

The infrastructure will enable faster transfers and downloads of Korean content and applications in Asia. KT CEO Hwang said it would contribute to Korea’s development of a creative economy.

KT added that the infrastructure could further make Korea an attractive destination for global information and communications technology companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as they could potentially set up data centers in the city.

“Those global companies could set their sights here as there will be more traffic heading to China and Southeast Asia than to the U.S.,” KT executive vice president Oh Seong-mok said at a press conference.

“This would spur Korea to become the Internet hub of Asia.”

KT said it will begin another project called the New Cross Pacific next month, linking Korea with China, Japan, Taiwan and the U.S. via 14,000-kilometer-long underwater cables for further regional communications integration by 2017.

By Park Hyong-ki (hkp@heraldcorp.com)