Cambodia Announces Upgrade Of Submarine Cable

Chea Vandeth, Cambodia's minister of post and telecommunications, has announced the government's plan to lay a submarine cable from Hong Kong to Sihanoukville and Phnom Penh in 2024.
It will replace an earlier version - much earlier; it was connected more than a decade ago.
Funding for the new submarine cable will involve a loan from the Chinese government. Ten years later, the minister said in an announcement that the sale of Internet services would repay the entire loan. He added that the project will be implemented for 30 years, "so in addition to repaying the loan, we will make a profit".
In addition to connecting submarine cables, he said the telecom ministry is working to install up to 1,000 Internet extension antenna masts in several areas of Phnom Penh. It will also remove Internet booster and repeater equipment, which the ministry believes disrupts Internet speeds.
As you might expect, demand for Internet service in Cambodia has increased dramatically in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but the country has relied on an infrastructure that was connected 15 years ago. So making Cambodia's Internet service faster and cheaper is sure to be welcome.
As of February, Cambodia had more than 17 million registered SIM cards (slightly more than the population, estimated at 16,891,245) and more than 310,000 fixed Internet users, according to data cited by the Phnom Penh Post.
The country has 38 Internet service providers and five operators of land-based and submarine fiber-optic infrastructure. There are an estimated 640 kilometers of submarine fiber optic cables in Cambodian waters.