Submarine cable is highway for data transmission. Submarine networks carry more than 95 percent of the world’s intercontinental electronic communications traffic. Submarine cables are critical infrastructure, which carries more than $10 trillion worth transactions, every day.

Submarine networking has recently seen several technological evolution. Recently, many new subsea announcements with make use of innovative technologies in Dry plant and Wet Plant. One of the latest advancements in wet plant side repeater known as Repeater Pump Farming. 

Introduction

 There are different ways to meet the high traffic demand in Submarine cable. We need more capacity. Demands keeps on increasing. How we can achieve it?

More Submarine cables, more number of channels (C+L band system), more number of fiber pairs, increasing per fiber capacity, increasing channel bandwidth i.e transponder/modem capacity.

Before 2018, the focus was on increasing the per fiber pair capacity. However, it has almost reached the maximum. Then why not, increasing the capacity in system level.

Global Marine, a leading provider of subsea fibre optic cable installation and maintenance solutions to the telecoms sector, and part of the Global Marine Group, has been awarded the Desk Top Study (DTS) for the Singapore India Gateway (SING) cable system by the system Purchasers.

Kalaam Telecom Group, a leading managed solutions provider for businesses across GCC and international markets, announced recently the launch of Kalaam Network Optical Transit (KNOT), a new fiber-optic terrestrial international cable system that enhances regional and international connectivity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), in partnership with Gulf Cooperation Council Interconnection Authority (GCCIA). The KNOT cable system will be fully owned and operated by Kalaam Telecom Group.

Megafon, the second-largest telecommunications company in Russia, announced on July 23 that it had launched offshore survey work for a planned $1 billion trans-Arctic subsea fiber-optic cable project that will connect Europe and Asia, the Arctic Connect subsea cable project. The offshore surveys started on August 5, undertaken by MegaFon’s joint venture with Finnish stated-owned infrastructure operator Cinia Ltd, and Russian-state-owned enterprise, Rosgeologiya.

Orient Link Pte. Ltd. (OLL) and NEC Corporation (NEC) announced recently that they have signed an agreement to build the MIST Cable System (MIST). MIST will directly connect Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and India (Mumbai and Chennai) and deliver a design capacity of more than 216 terabits per second (Tbps). Construction of the nearly 8,100-kilometer optical submarine cable is targeted to be completed by the third quarter of FY2022.

According to the FCC submarine cable landing license for the Jupiter cable system, Facebook will land its Oregon branch of the Jupiter cable system into an existing cable landing staion at Cloverdale, Oregon, the Pacific City CLS, which is owned by Microsoft Infrastructure Group, LLC (MIGL). Facebook owns two of the five fiber pairs on Jupiter's main trunk connecting Maruyama and Shima, Japan, with Hermosa Beach, California. Facebook wholly owns two fiber pairs on Jupiter's Oregon branch, landing into the Pacific City CLS at Cloverdale, Oregon.

According to the FCC Public Notice, the FCC granted submairne cable landing licenses for the JGA North and the JGA South on July 14. RTI and NEC announced the successful completion of the JGA North cable system on July 6, while the JGA South cable system has been in-service temporarily since March. The FCC also granted submarine cable landing licenses for Jupiter, Southern Cross Next in July.

According to the FCC public notice, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved the submarine cable landing license for the Southern Cross NEXT cable system as of July 16, 2020. Pacific Carriage Limited Inc. (PCLI), the US landing party of the South Cross Next, filed the application for cable landing license on August 9 2019. It took the FCC and the Executive Branch of the United States Government (also known as Team Telecom) less than 12 months to review and grant cable landing license for the Southern Cross NEXT cable system. 

Google announced Tuesday the investment of a new subsea cable—Grace Hopper—which will run between the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain, providing better resilience for the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products. SumCom is the supplier and turn-key contractor for the Grace Hopper cable. And the Grace Hopper cable project is expected to be completed in 2022.

Cinturion Corp Ltd. (Cinturion) announced a major milestone advancing the Trans Europe Asia System (TEAS), a new generation of data transport infrastructure which will serve the rapidly growing requirements of the markets between Europe and India. Stonecourt Capital, an investment firm based in New York, will collaborate with Cinturion to develop the TEAS cable system. 

Rostelecom PJSC announced on Friday that it has launched a new TEA NEXT project, to construct a new generation fiber-optic communication line connecting Russian western and eastern borders under a working title TEA NEXT. The TEA NEXT will offer 96 dark fiber cores (48 fiber pairs), the first offering of dark fiber across Russia. Rostelecom has found a new special purpose company Atlas to develop and operate the TEA NEXT project which will cost about US$500.

In a blog post by Google Global Networking experts Valey Kamalov and Mattia Cantono on Friday,  Google unveiled a recent experiment using its subsea cables to detect earthquakes and tsunamis. Google has developed a technique which is capable of dectecting earthquakes and tsunamis over tens of thousands of kilometers away, using current in-service subsea cables and equipment that is present on the vast majority of the world’s existing subsea cable systems.

NO-UK Com AS and Altibox Carrier announced that the marine survey for the NO-UK submarine fibre cable between Newcastle and Stavanger is now underway. Since the contract came into force in February 2020, the permits required to commence the offshore survey activities have been obtained by Xtera and the MV Fugro Galaxy has now started survey operations in the North Sea.

Crosslake Fibre announced on Tuesday its newest subsea cable project, CrossChannel Fibre. The historic, next-generation 550km cable is the first fibre-optic subsea cable to be built across the English Channel in nearly twenty years and will connect Slough, United Kingdom and Paris, France. This new subsea cable is designed to support the increase in bandwidth requirements from telecoms, enterprises, content providers, as well as financial, gaming, and media companies that require high capacity, low latency connectivity. The high fibre count, non-repeatered system will contain 96 fibre pairs, each providing over 20 terabits per second of capacity throughput, and will be ready for service in the fall of 2021.

Sparkle and Ciena announced on Monday the upgrade of Sparkle’s fiber pair on the Curie submarine cable system connecting Chile to the US. The upgrade was deployed with Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e), the industry’s first 800G programmable solution, resulting in an ultimate capacity of up to 19Tbps on Sparkle's fiber pair on the Curie cable system, using 400Gbps and 450Gbps wavelengths, operating at 95Gbaud.