SMW5 consortium and Ciena completed a significant upgrade to the SEA-ME-WE 5 submarine cable system in August 2019, by deploying Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme which features the 6500 Packet-Optical platform. The upgrade increased SMW5 cable system design capacity to 38Tbps, and reduced 100G unit cost by 70%. After the upgrade, SMW5 cable system offers hybrid 100G/200G waves, and is able to increase the capacity per wave up to 300Gbps. 

Ciena announced recently the completion of IMEWE upgrade, deploying Ciena’s coherent optical solutions and automation software to address network capacity requirements in the region. IMEWE cable system is using Ciena’s WaveLogic Ai technology to deploy 200G per wave on the majority of the IMEWE digital line section. Leveraging leading edge technologies, Ciena’s solutions provide IMEWE with a network capable of delivering immediate capacity upgrades while providing a foundation for continued growth. 

Orange announced at AfricaCom the construction of a new international backbone network in West Africa. This infrastructure will be built around a terrestrial fibre optic network coupled with submarine cables and will benefit from centralized supervision. This multi-regional West African network will connect to the rest of the world through various submarine cables and will link up all the main capital cities in the region: Dakar, Bamako, Abidjan, Accra, Lagos…

Liquid Telecom announced on Wednesday the launch of the fastest direct land-based fibre link connecting East to West Africa. This breakthrough coast-to-coast digital corridor follows the completion of Liquid Telecom’s new high-capacity fibre link running 2,600-kilometre (km) across the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Liquid Telecom continues expanding its pan-African terrestrial fibre network rapidly.

This article aims to take a closer look at a bunch of subsea routes with potential for new submarine cables where, response to the question - why should someone build a submarine cable on this subsea route, leads to logical conversation, if not winning argument. It gains relevance in the backdrop of high fiber count cables shifting market focus from Wavelength ownership to Fiber Pair (FP) ownership. Further this shift in subsea connectivity paradigm is set go beyond OTT play to wider provider community led by forthcoming demonetization of FP economics.

The EllaLink Group and Telxius recently announced that they have signed a collaboration agreement for international subsea capacity and terrestrial connectivity in Latin America, including cable landing facilities in Fortaleza, Brazil. The complementary infrastructure owned by EllaLink and Telxius will enable European traffic to reach Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and other key cities in Brazil and across Latin America.

Crosslake Fibre, the first new fibre-optic cable connecting Toronto and New York has entered commercial service as of October 22, 2019. Crosslake Fibre delivers diverse, ultra-low latency route linking Toronto's largest carrier hotels, Equinix TR2 at 45 Parliament Street and 151 Front Street West, to Equinix NY4 in Secaucus, New Jersey with multiple extensions to various points-of-presence in both cities. Crosslake Fibre provides lit and dark fiber services interconnecting Toronto, Secaucus, NJ and Buffalo, NY using the route. The RTD is less than 9ms over Crosslake Fibre route.

In a parntership with Ciena, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier newly launched Encrypted Lambda service. The Encrypted Lambda service encrypts data on hardware located at the client’s site and protects it over Layer 1, the physical layer, while it is transmitted. This sets it apart from conventional solutions by allowing for larger data volumes with higher performance, lower costs and faster speeds. 

Unarguably the landscape of transoceanic submarine cables has been very interesting for the last 5-years. It’s transformative impact to create digital, social and economic proximity globally is well understood and accepted unquestionably. While the leaps in photonics, optoelectronic integration and modulation techniques in submarine optical transmission likely to flatten progressively, the next 5-years going forward equally interesting,

Digital Realty and Interxion announced on Tuesday they have entered into a definitive agreement to combine their businesses to create a leading global provider of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions.  Under the terms of the agreement, Interxion shareholders will receive a fixed exchange ratio of 0.7067 Digital Realty shares per Interxion share.  The transaction values Interxion at approximately $93.48 per ordinary share or approximately $8.4 billion of total enterprise value, including assumed net debt.

At the Submarine Networks World 2019 event, there was a new brand from Africa: Botswana Fiber Networks (BoFiNet). Never aware of BoFiNet’s involvement in any submarine cable project, I was quite curiously and had an interview with Mr. Keabetswe Segole, Commercial Executive at BoFiNet. Then I got to understand BoFiNet has invested in WACS and EASSY subsea cables and is the operator which connects Botswana to global submarine networks. BoFiNet has co-built with Paratus the fiber network from WACS cable landing station in Swakopmund, Namibia to Botswana. And BoFiNet is co-building with Broadband Infraco the terrestrial fiber cable connecting Botswana and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Wall, NJ and Madrid, Spain – October 14, 2019 - NJFX, the only Cable Landing Station (CLS) colocation campus in the U.S offering Tier 3, carrier-neutral data center capabilities, and Telxius, the communications infrastructure company of the Telefónica Group, announce significant development at their Cable Landing Station (CLS) campuses. As a driver of collaboration among carriers, subsea cable operators, enterprises and cloud providers within its CLS ecosystem, NJFX marks the spot of the first-ever CLS to CLS terrestrial interconnection, which connects NJFX CLS in Wall, NJ to Telxius facilities at the CLS in Virginia Beach, VA. The NJFX ecosystem boom is driven in part by its strategic location 64 feet above sea level and Category 5 hurricane resistant CLS campus with access to three subsea cables today, increasing to a total of four subsea cables in 4Q2019 that will exceed capacity of 500 Terabits per second of transmission capacity. The Telxius communications campus at Virginia Beach provides direct access to the top two capacity subsea cables in the world, MAREA and BRUSA.

Asia is riding a wave of activity in submarine development. Hong Kong SAR alone will see six new ‘cable landings’ on its shores in the near future. There is also a raft of other cable developments in APAC, coincided with the emergence of new technologies and business models, all of which are facilitating increasing diversity of routes and improved latency.

According to Diario de Tenerife (Official Information of the Cabildo de Tenerife) and Radio Televisión Canaria (rtvc), the Cabildo de Tenerife (the Government of Tenerife, Canary Islands) and Google signed an memorandum on May 23^rd to explore the possibility of connecting Google's Equiano subsea cable to the island, to strengthen telecommunications connectivity between the Canary Islands, Europe and Africa. Tenerife intends to join Google's Equiano subsea cable project through Canalink. The document was signed by the president of the Island Corporation, Carlos Alonso; and the head of the development of the Google submarine cable network for Southern Europe and Africa, Chris George.

St Helena Government (SHG) announced on July 19 that it had issued a letter of intent to connect St Helena to Google's Equiano subsea cable project. This will provide the first fibre optic connectivity from St Helena to the outside world through both Europe and South Africa. 

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.