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Belt and Road Initiative
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China Unicom launches new Hong Kong-Cambodia cable link as mainland firms leverage city

The project ties a high-speed data and information corridor running through Southeast Asia with Hong Kong

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A new state-of-the-art submarine cable enabling faster internet for Cambodia has made a successful landing in Hong Kong earlier this week. Photo: Sina
Frank Chenin Shanghai

A new state-of-the-art submarine cable, which will enable faster internet for Cambodia, made a successful landing in Hong Kong earlier this week, another milestone in a series of projects undertaken by Chinese firms to bolster information infrastructure by laying and expanding international seabed networks.

The project, named SHV-HK, links Sihanoukville, a coastal port city in Cambodia, to Hong Kong, traversing 3,000 kilometres through the Gulf of Thailand, the southern tip of Vietnam and the vast South China Sea before reaching the Tseung Kwan O landing station in Hong Kong. Its investor is state-owned telecommunications giant China Unicom.

“The linkage forms part of China-Cambodia cooperation in digital infrastructure under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative,” the telecoms firm said in a statement. It said it would aim to significantly strengthen overseas internet connection for Cambodia’s 17.3 million people and address gaps in the country’s digital development.

More broadly, the project would tie a high-speed data and information corridor running through Southeast Asia with the information hub of Hong Kong, according to China Unicom.
The SHV-HK link features modern submarine fibre-optic cables that sit at the bottom of the ocean, with a total designed capacity of 80 terabits per second along its main line. It is expected to handle a data flow capacity of 3.2 million simultaneous 4K ultra-high-definition video streams, enabling an enormous amount of data to fly across the ocean floor in a fraction of a second.

The project also forms a synergy with the land-based China-Laos-Cambodia data links and adds more resilience to Cambodia’s overseas internet connectivity, securing data transmission and communications between China and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).

Leading Chinese firms in technology and telecoms have engaged in a flurry of investment in new data centres, as well as land and submarine cables, to expand computing capacity. Finance, artificial intelligence, biomedicine and autonomous driving all rely on high-performance computing.

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