The Asia Link Cable (ALC), which was co-built by 12 domestic and international operators, including China Unicom Global Limited (China Unicom) and China Telecom Global Limited, was connected to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on May 14.
As the first high-capacity international submarine cable landing in China at the start of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period, ALC is the world’s first to adopt an intelligent optical network for submarine cable traffic management. Together with the SEA-H2X cable, in which China Unicom participated and which landed in Hong Kong in November, ALC forms a network connecting Hong Kong, South China’s Hainan Province and Singapore. This architecture enables automatic millisecond-level link switching, achieving 99.999% ultra-high reliability.
The ALC serves as a critical digital artery linking China and Southeast Asia. It spans about 6,100 kilometers and covers key digital hubs in Hong Kong, Hainan, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei.
Leveraging forward-looking planning and technological innovation, the ALC achieves a per-fiber-pair capacity of 27 Terabits per second. The latency on the Hong Kong-Hainan-Singapore trunk route is optimized to 32 milliseconds. Based on industry-standard traffic conversion, this enables the transmission of over 80 billion Tokens per second, efficiently supporting ultra-large-scale real-time cross-border AI scheduling and global computing power coordination. It provides a high-speed, stable, and safe international channel for the global expansion of emerging business models such as the digital economy, AI and Token economy.
The successful landing of the ALC establishes a multi-layered, three-dimensional network architecture for China Unicom in the Asia-Pacific region, consisting of three traditional and three new-generation cables. This further consolidates China's network advantages within the global internet landscape.
With all three new-generation cables landing in Hong Kong, the city’s unique positioning of “backed by the motherland and connecting with the world” will be continuously strengthened, solidifying its status as an international digital hub. They will also deepen submarine cable connectivity between the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Hainan Free Trade Port, and ASEAN countries, thereby facilitating China’s high-level opening-up and regional integrated development.
(Executive editor: Zuo Shihan)
