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.

A project from Angola Cables could soon start connecting the BRICS bloc countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

"Angola Cables' network, including the cable between Brazil and Angola, would allow an immediate connection of the BRICS. In fact, we are at this moment talking to the South African part to promote the connectivity," António Nunes, CEO of the Angolan telecom group, told BNamericas in an exclusive interview.

New Delhi, India and Tokyo, Japan, July 12, 2018 – Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), a Government of India Enterprise, and NEC Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. (NECTI) announced today that a purchase order has been placed by BSNL for NECTI to design, engineer, supply, install, test and implement an optical submarine cable system connecting Chennai and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands (A&N Islands). NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701), the parent company of NECTI, will manufacture the optical submarine cable and provide technical assistance during the turnkey implementation.

China Mobile International (CMI) announced that it will build the BtoBE submarine cable connecting the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area, and Singapore. Transmission efficiency between globally important cities in the Pacific Rim will be further improved by the BtoBE submarine cable, which will link the two large-scale bay areas of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay and San Francisco Bay.

Tokyo, 9 July, 2018 – The Bay to Bay Express Cable System (BtoBE) consortium, composed of China Mobile International, Facebook and Amazon Web Services, signed an agreement with NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE:6701) to build a high performance submarine cable connecting Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States.

This JUPITER cable system overview is prepared according to the information released by JUPITER Consortium in their application for cable landing license to FCC. JUPITER cable system will have a total length of 14,557 kilometers and consist of three main segments, main trunk with 5 fiber pairs, Philippines branch with 2 fiber pairs and  Oregon branch with 2 fiber pairs. Each fiber pair will have a total design capacity of 12 Tbps per fiber pair, for a total of 60 Tbps for the JUPITER cable system as a whole.

You might have heard from recent news that those hyper-scale Internet players such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other Global Internet companies have all participated in the submarine cable investment. They have put up huge investment and some of them even have built their own cable systems to support their dramatic growth in global bandwidth demand. This new impetus has invigorated the industry which traditionally considered belong to the “Club Community” of incumbent operators in the telecommunications industry. However, how much do you know about this so-called traditional industry?

Subsea cable systems are critical infrastructure for global internet and cloud platforms. According to Telegeography, there are now 366 subsea cables worldwide. Among those subsea cables, the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN) is one of significant importance, as it is a game-changing cable for connectivity, internet and cloud infrastructure across the Pacific.

Submarine cables form the very backbone of the internet, by facilitating the world’s connectivity as over 98% of all data and voice communications traverse along this ocean-spanning critical network infrastructure. 

Rapid technological advancements such as 4G and 5G mobile networks, the introduction of new data-intensive applications like 4K & 8K streaming video/TV, the rising popularity of social media platforms, and the escalating adoption of cloud computing underpin the importance of the global submarine cable network; transmitting light across the oceans to enable the world to function in today’s fast-moving, data-driven global digital economy.

TE SubCom said that it has signed the South Pacific Marine Maintenance Agreement (SPMMA) with 14 cable operators in the South Pacific region to maintain over 51,000 km of cable that constitutes 19 disparate telecommunications and power cable systems. The SPMMA area includes the South Pacific region from Singapore in the west to Tahiti in the east, and from New Zealand at the southernmost point to Hawaii in the north, says TE SubCom.

SEACOM, has upgraded its SEACOM submarine cable system from its Southern and Eastern African coastline landings into Europe at a total capacity of 1.5Tbps. The current upgrade is adding 500G of new capacity on the SEACOM submarine cable system, after a previous upgrade of 500G about 18 months ago. This further upgrade falls in line with SEACOM’s focus on driving the development of the African internet and opening the broadband tap for African service providers and business users.

[Tianjin, China, June 5, 2018] Super SEA Cable Networks Pte Ltd (SEAX), together with the supplier Huawei International and Huawei Marine Networks, today announced that following successful completion of construction and end-to-end testing, the SEAX-1 Cable System has achieved RFPA (Ready for Provisional Acceptance) on 29 May 2018.

Telstra recently announced it has expanded its world-first ‘Always On’ service to provide more bandwidth options and lower latency on some of Asia’s busiest subsea cable routes – Hong Kong to Singapore and Japan to Hong Kong. The service utilises the unmatched scale and diversity of Telstra’s cable network in the Asia Pacific region to reroute traffic to another path, even in the event of a cable cut or damage due to a natural disaster.

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Angola Cables has added additional peering points at the following international locations: IX.BR São Paulo and Fortaleza, Equinix Ashburn and Miami (formerly NOTA) and NIIX and De-CIX in New York. Angola Cables owns and operates the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) connecting Angola and Fortaleza in Brazil, the world's first submarine cable system across the South Atlantic. Angola Cables also owns two dedicated fiber pairs in the Monet cable system connecting Boca Raton, Florida to both Fortaleza and Santos, Brazil. The Monet cable system has been fully launched for service, while the SACS is going to be ready for service in the third quarter 2018.