By this autumn, two new undersea cables – SACS and SAIL - will connect Africa to South America and the USA. Whilst all new fibre capacity to the continent is to be welcomed, these routes will need to find something more than just national demand to be feasible. Russell Southwood looks at what each cable promises and the likely downward pressure on international wholesale prices.

There are well recognised benefits to developing economies from investing in connectivity. However, the most pressing problems with facilitating the creation of new business and economic growth is a lack of the legacy infrastructure that has slowly been built in developed economies over the past 150 years. These infrastructure requirements include railway lines, highways, ports, telecommunication facilities and subsea cables, upon which the modern internet is built.

According to GlobeNet,  it plans the deployment of a new 2,500 km submarine cable that will link Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires. This new infrastructure will connect Argentina to the GlobeNet network in Brazil, effectively linking the Southern Cone of South America to the United States and the world.

According to Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), Equinix and Telxius are working together on U.S. facilities and services for the next-generation cable landing station architecture for the MAREA and BRUSA cable systems. The two subsea cables will terminate in the U.S. directly into the MAREA and BRUSA cable landing station located in Virginia Beach, VA, and the capacity will extend the backhaul capacity into Equinix DC2 International Business Exchange™ (IBX^®) data center, representing the newest innovative design in subsea cable infrastructure.

One can never have too much capacity or too low a cost; these have been two significant drivers in telecoms for quite some time. The desire for as much capacity as possible pushed Xtera (www.xtera.com) to develop all-Raman terrestrial systems with 100 nm bandwidth and great reach. However, the high power requirements of all-Raman technology made it applicable mainly to terrestrial and unrepeatered subsea systems. For repeatered subsea systems, Xtera combines low-power Raman with EDFA to get the benefits of both technologies.

So Subpartners and Superloop are busily progressing the Indigo cable system project and there has been tremendous progress over recent weeks. A huge milestone was reached in mid July with Alcatel's Ile De Brehat cable laying ship departing Calais in France with over 7000km of cable and repeaters destined for an area near Christmas Island via Singapore. From there it will begin laying the cable in August 2018 down the Western Australian coast to Perth before continuing through to Sydney!

Virginia Beach is now a hot site for submarine cable landing, hosting MAREA, BRUSA, SAEx1 and Dunant submarine cable systems.

Microsoft and Facebook partnering with Telxius landed their 160Tbps MAREA cable system at the Virginia Beach Cable Landing Station (CLS) site at 1900 Corporate Landing Parkway in Virginia Beach.

In the latest years Marseille has become one of the key Mediterranean data hubs. The exponential increase in demand for data in Africa, Middle East and Asia has attracted data center providers and operators to establish this area as one of their key connectivity hubs for all the traffic into and out of the European region.

MAREA, the highest capacity submarine cable to ever cross the Atlantic, lands in the north of Spain (Bilbao) and connects to the most important European backbones reaching the most relevant connectivity hubs including Marseille.

The Management Committee of the AAE-1 Consortium, made up of 19 global telecommunications operators, has appointed Giuseppe Sini, Head of Retelit International Business Unit, as the Vice Chairman of the AAE-1 Management Committee. The Retelit manager chaired the recently held Management Committee Meeting held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

The cable laying phase of the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) system is complete, with the final splice having been completed south-east of Singapore.

Vocus Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Kevin Russell recognised the significance of the milestone.

Hawaiki Submarine Cable has selected Peak 10 + ViaWest (now Flexential) Brookwood data center in Hillsboro, Oregon as its US PoP (point of presence) and terminal station to install the SLTE of Hawaiki cable system. The Hawaiki cable stretchs more than 14,000 km across the Pacific Ocean and is the first carrier-neutral, low-latency, fiber-optic connection between the continental U.S., Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and American Samoa, with system capacity of 43.8 Tbps. The New Cross Pacific (NCP) cable system is also terminated at the Brookwood data center.

Auckland, New Zealand - 20 July 2018: Independent telecommunications challenger, Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP today commenced commercial operations for its 15,000 km fibre optic deep-sea cable linking Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific and United States.

The $US300 million Hawaiki Submarine Cable System represents a new dawn for digital communications in the region, delivering 43 terabits of additional capacity - several times the current levels of Australia and New Zealand combined - on a fully diverse subsea route.

Telecom Argentina S.A. ("Telecom Argentina")  and Seaborn Networks ("Seaborn") announced today that the ARBR submarine cable system between Argentina and Brazil (ARBR") will be landing in Telecom Argentina's cable landing station in Las Toninas, Argentina. In addition, Telecom Argentina shall provide ARBR with dark fiber on a backhaul route between Las Toninas and Buenos Aires, as well as point of presence (POP) space in Buenos Aires.

EATONTOWN, N.J., July 17, 2018 – TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company and an industry pioneer in undersea communications technology, today announced that Google has selected the company as the supplier of its Dunant submarine cable system. The four-fiber pair cable system will span over 6,400km and will connect the East Coast of the United States to Europe. The cable will add dedicated capacity to Google’s global network and will enable interconnection to other subsea infrastructure in the region.

According to ProPakistani and China Xinhua News, the Pak-China Optical Fiber Cable (Pak-China OFC), which connects Pakistan with China through Khunjerab, was put into service on Friday, July 13, 2018. The Pak-China cable will be jointly operated and maintained by Special Communication Organization of Pakistan and China Telecom. China Telecom and SCO have sucessfully completed the acceptance and commission test of the cross-border system. 

Metro Optic, Crosslake Fibre, and Utilities Kingston announced on Thursday their plans to build a new fibre-optic cable system from Montréal to Toronto. The project will be developed by Maple Leaf Fibre Ltd., a joint venture of two leading independent Canadian providers of fibre optic network capacity, Crosslake Fibre ULC based in Toronto, Ontario and Metro Optic based in Montréal, Quebec. The Maple Leaf Fibre cable system will have a terrestrial segment between Montréal, Ottawa, and Kingston, and a submarine segment through Lake Ontario between Kingston and downtown Toronto.