Keppel – one of the owners of the Bifrost Cable System – said on Thursday that the subsea cable linking the US to Southeast Asia is now ready for service and will now gear up to carry commercial traffic in the coming weeks.

Spanning over 20,000 km, the Bifrost system – which has been under construction by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) since 2021 – is backed by Keppel Midgard Holdings (KMH), Meta, Amazon and Telin. The cable connects California and Oregon in the US with Singapore via intermediate landing points in Guam, Jakarta and Manado in Indonesia, and Davao in the Philippines.

Bifrost boasts a round-trip latency of just under 165 milliseconds between Singapore and the US, whoch Keppel said is up to 10 milliseconds faster than many existing systems.

Bifrost also introduces more than 260 Tbps of additional capacity along the trans-Pacific corridor, and is engineered to support AI workloads, cloud-native platforms, and real-time digital services, said Manjot Singh Mann, CEO of Keppel’s Connectivity division.

“This landmark project will bolster digital connectivity between Southeast Asia and the USA,” he said in a statement. “The Bifrost Cable System will reinforce Singapore’s position as a leading digital hub in Asia and support the region’s rapidly growing digital economy.”

Dennis Anthony Uy, CEO of Converge ICT Solutions – which landed the Bifrost cable in Davao in August – said the system will support the booming connectivity needs of the Asia-Pacific region and provide an important direct link with the US.

“This will not only boost the company’s international bandwidth capacity, but for the Philippines, it will mean redundancy and diversity in network infrastructure to power the country’s digital journeys,” he said.

Keppel has been assigned five out of a total of 12 fibre pairs in Bifrost. The five pairs are jointly owned by Keppel and its private fund co-investors through a 40-60 joint venture.