The 4,700km Coral Sea Cable System under construction by Vocus, has achieved two major milestones, with the cable now installed at the landing sites at both Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

In the Solomon Islands on Monday 15 July 2019, a ceremony featuring a symbolic handover of a ‘golden buoy’ formally marked the beginning of work to lay the cable between Honiara and Sydney.

RTI and GTA announced that the management teams of RTI and GTA have entered into a joint venture and are constructing the Gateway Network Connections, LLC (GNC) facility that will serve as Guam’s first combined neutral Cable Landing Station (CLS) and Data Center (DC). GNC is a new build and will be located adjacent to GTA’s existing Piti-I CLS. JGA North, JGA South, HK-G, SEA-US and SxS will interconnect with each other at GNC’s neutral facility, and GTA’s network across Guam will allow for seamless connectivity between GNC and other active cables landed on Guam.

Vocus has announced its Australian Singapore Cable (ASC) system was now operating with an end-to-end total capacity of 60 terabits per second (Tbps) – 50% more capacity than it launched with less than 10 months ago. In addition to the increased end-to-end capacity, the ASC’s Singapore to Indonesia connection now has a capacity of up to 44Tbps and its Perth to Indonesia connection now has a capacity of up to 33Tbps.

Google Argentina and Antel Uruguay have announced to extend the Tannat subsea cable to the nearby coastal city of Las Toninas in the Buenos Aires province, Argentina. And the Tannat extension is expected to be be ready for service in August 2020. The 2000km Brazil-Uruguay Tannat subsea cable has been operational since mid-2018, connecting Santos, Brazil, to Maldonado, Uruguay.

Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) has introduced an innovative design approach, SDM1 by ASN, Spatial Division Multiplexing, optimizing cost per bit. This disruptive solution is an alternative to the traditional design philosophy status quo. The SDM1 by ASN is revolutionizing the traditional submarine network design: "High power, High OSNR, High Effective Area (Aeff) fibre" by using "Low Power, Low OSNR, Low Aeff Fibre and more fibre pairs".

MainOne has announced an Open Access metro fiber infrastructure project in two states of Nigeria, with the support from Facebook. The infrastructure collaboration is part of Facebook’s efforts to connect more people to broadband internet. As part of this open access project, MainOne is building and operating approximately 750 km terrestrial fiber infrastructure in Edo and Ogun States, two of Nigeria’s fastest growing states.

MainOne Cable Company signed supply contract with TE SubCom in September 2018 to extend the MainOne submarine cable system with two additional branches connecting Senegal (Dakar) and Cote D’Ivoire (Abidjan). SubCom will light the new branches with Ciena’s transmission equipment, which enables this flexibility and higher capacity. It is also an industry first for the deployment of undersea spectrum-sharing in Africa.

Telecoms environment across the Continent of Africa, especially the domain of Terrestrial Fiber Networks is a short-term Goldmine for most stakeholders, but a long-term nightmare for the stakeholders that really matter – the People / Users.

You would think that Telecom Project Costs across Africa should fall each year, as technologies mature, developed market networks reach scale, equipment’s are optimized, rapid obsolescence and large market dynamics of Africa come into play , right ?. Wrong.

Google followed by Facebook are the behemoths of submarine cables with global investments in 22 cable systems over the last 10 years. It seems, their submarine cable investments will continue unabated for the foreseeable future. Expectedly hence, they are also the key driving force for technology innovations in wet plat and dry plant leading to many firsts in subsea data transmission. In parallel they are developing captive hyperscale datacenters in developed markets and pursuing in country presence in emerging markets in collaboration and co-investment with local providers. The objective evidently is to accelerate availability of affordable broadband. For Africa, it includes Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria, where they have already ventured. In doing so they bring together learnings from scaling global infrastructure with local provider’s knowledge of the market landscape to develop new working models with open infrastructure.

Cisco and Acacia Communications announced on Tuesday they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Cisco has agreed to acquire Acacia. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco has agreed to acquire Acacia for $70.00 per share in cash, or for approximately $2.6 billion on a fully diluted basis, net of cash and marketable securities.

Google has been obviously the largest owner and investor in submarine cable networks globally. Upon announcing its latest investment of the private Equiano subsea cable system, Google has invested in 14 subsea cable systems, with approximately 112,000km cable length in a total. Between 2016 and 2018, Google invested US$47 billion in capex to improve Google Could infrastructure which includes 134 points of presence (PoP) and 14 subsea cable investments globally.

Google has officially announced its fully funded new private Equiano subsea cable, connecting Portugal, South Africa and other African countries. A contract to build the Equiano cable with Alcatel Submarine Networks was signed in Q4 2018. Certain potential landing party and professionals have released the Equiano cable project earlier. Between 2016 and 2018, Google invested US$47 billion in capex, which includes investment in improving its global infrastructure.

PacketFabric announced recently the expansion of its platform to Sydney, Australia. The PacketFabric platform is now available at the Equinix SY4 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®). This Sydney point of presence (PoP) is the first data center in the Asia-Pacific region on PacketFabric’s network. PacketFabric and Hawaiki Cable concluded earlier a strategic, mutually beneficial partnership agreement.

The INDIGO consortium comprising AARNet, Google, Indosat Ooredoo, Singtel, SubPartners and Telstra announced on May 30^th that the INDIGO subsea cable system is ready for use. The INDIGO cable consists of two fiber pairs, with a design capacity of around 36 Tbps. INDIGO cable system features new spectrum-sharing technology, each consortium member can deploy its own SLTE, upgrade their networks and enable capacity increases on demand independently.

Infinera and Fastweb announced recently the successful demonstration of 500Gbps single-wavelength DWDM service connectivity in a production network using Infinera’s configurable technology on the Groove platform. The high-speed optical transmission demonstration, the first in Italy, spanned over 180 kilometers (km) on Fastweb’s low-latency long-haul backbone network, between Milan and Turin.

Zayo Group announced on Wednesday that it has signed a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by affiliates of Digital Colony Partners (“Digital Colony”) and the EQT Infrastructure IV fund (“EQT” or “EQT Infrastructure”). The transaction would result in Zayo transitioning from a public company to a private company. Under the new ownership, the Zayo team would continue to execute the Company’s strategy and remain headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. The transaction valued at $14.3 billion, including the assumption of $5.9 billion of Zayo’s net debt obligations.