Manila  - President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo inaugurated on Tuesday the Philippine leg of a 550-million-dollar fiber optic cable network that will connect several South-East Asian countries with the United States.

The 20,000-kilometre Asia American Gateway (AAG) network will link Malaysia to the US via Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and the US West Coast through an undersea cable system.

The network is scheduled to be completed within the year.

"The AAG network is expected to meet the foreseen explosive growth in bandwidth requirements for new and revolutionary broadband applications such as Internet Protocol, video, data, and other multi-media services," a government statement said.

"The project will provide much needed direct access and diverse routing between South-East Asia and the US and will have advantages over the traditional Trans-Pacific routes in that it would avoid some of the areas most prone to seismic activity," it added.

The AAG network has the potential to extend capacity to other locations in North-East and South-East Asia, India, Australia, Africa and Europe.

The network is owned by a consortium of 10 parties - the Brunei government, Telstra of Australia, AT&T of the US, Bharti of India, CAT of Thailand, PLDT of the Philippines, PT Telkom of Indonesia, Telekom Malaysia, StarHub of Singapore and VNPT of Vietnam. (dpa)