DUBLIN – 1st April 2021 –  Aqua Comms DAC (“Aqua Comms”), the owner and operator of America Europe Connect-1 (AEC-1), America Europe Connect-2 (AEC-2) and CeltixConnect-1 (CC-1) today announced that it has been acquired by digital investment trust Digital 9 Infrastructure PLC (“D9”).

According to Djibouti Telecom, the DARE-1 cable connecting Djibouti, Somalia and Kenya has been in service since early February 2021. The DARE-1 cable spans about 4,900 km, equipped with the latest generation of optical fiber for a total system capacity of 36Tbps on three fiber pairs.

According to the U.S. Inernational Development Finance Corportation (DFC), leaders from the U.S.’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), and the Australian Government announced a trilateral partnership to invest in infrastructure projects in the Indo-Pacific region at the Indo-Pacific Business Forum hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on July 30, 2018.

Facebook announced on Sunday (March 28th) investments in two vital new subsea cables to connect Singapore, Indonesia, and the United States, i.e., Echo subsea cable system and Bifrost cable system. These two cable systems will be the first transpacific cables through a new diverse route crossing the Java Sea and will increase overall transpacific capacity by 70 percent.

Keppel Telecommunications & Transportation Limited (Keppel T&T), through a wholly owned subsidiary, Keppel Midgard Holdings Pte. Ltd. (KMH), a subsidiary of Facebook Inc. (Facebook) and PT. Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin), a subsidiary of PT Telkom Indonesia (Persero) Tbk are pleased to announce that they have entered into a joint build agreement to jointly own and develop the Bifrost Cable System, the world's first subsea cable system that directly connects Singapore to the west coast of North America via Indonesia through the Java Sea and Celebes Sea.

In a latest post today by Bikash Koley, VP of Global Networking, Google Cloud, Google announced the investment in Echo subsea cable system, a new subsea cable directly connecting Singapore to the United States.

Echo cable will run from Eureka, California to Singapore, with a stop-over in Guam, with plans to also land in Indonesia. Additional landings are possible in the future. 

Claro and Telxius announced recently the landing of the South Pacific Submarine Cable (SPSC) or ‘Mistral’ in Peru. Mistral is Telxius' commercial name of the South Pacific Submarine Cable (SPSC). The SPSC/Mistral cable system is a new high-capacity fiber optic submarine cable, which runs along the Latin American Pacific coast to link up Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Chile and which provides a direct connection with servers available in the United States.

Aqua Comms has upgraded its two Trans-Atlantic submarine cable routes with Ciena’s cutting-edge GeoMesh Extreme submarine network solution to meet digital connectivity demands across the US, Ireland, Denmark, and the UK. Aqua Comms' AEC-1 transatlantic cable system has been completely modernized and upgraded to support 400GbE services leveraging Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e), doubling the cable’s capacity to almost 20Tbps.

According to Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s number one platform for private investors, Digital 9 Infrastructure announced plans to list its shares and then buy Aqua Comms as its first investment. Aqua Comms' major assests include transatlantic subsea cables AEC-1 and AEC-2 and other network assets in Europe. The transaction would be $215m (£155m) on a cash-free, debt-free basis.

Submarine cable is highway for data transmission. Submarine networks carry more than 99 percent of the world’s intercontinental electronic communications traffic. Submarine cables are critical infrastructure, which carries approximately more than $15 trillion worth transactions, every day.

Submarine networking has recently seen several technological evolutions. Recently, many new subsea announcements with make use of innovative technologies in Dry plant or Subsea terminal and Wet Plant or Submerged plant.

Subsea cable systems are quite common in Cancun. After all, Telmex and other companies have already used the city as a landing point for past projects like the AMX-1. A cable system connecting Florida and Cancun just hasn’t been seen in over 20 years.

However, FB Submarine Partners, a new international telecoms network developer, announced that they are building a 1,200 km Mexican Caribbean subsea cable. the GigNet-1 subsea cable system. This is in collaboration with network provider GigNet Inc. and EPC contractor Xtera. And here’s what you need to know about it.

According to press release of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) of Egypt, Telecom Egypt and Suez Canal Authority, in coordination with the Armed Forces Signal Corps, has signed an agreement to create a new route for fiber optic internet cables between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean through Al Morshedeen Road. The agreement signing was witnessed by the ICT Minister Amr Talaat, Suez Canal Authority Chairman Osama Rabie, and the Armed Forces Signal Corps Head Tarek El-Zaher. 

Tokyo, March 19, 2021 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) and its subsidiary OCC Corporation announced today that they have completed full qualification of subsea repeaters and optical cable containing up to 24 fiber pairs (FPs) (48 fibers). This is a 50% improvement in fiber count over the 16 fiber pair systems generally available today. This development allows cable owners worldwide to construct subsea telecom cables with superior traffic capacity while reducing the cost per bit of the wet plant. This approach is fully in line with SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) system architectures. NEC's 24 FP solution not only provides more flexibility to operate in the subsea fiber pair market, it also enables better connectivity in high-density subsea branches.

Amsterdam, 16 March 2021 - The world’s largest Internet Exchanges (IXs) ​AMS-IX​, DE-CIX​, ​LINX​, and ​Netnod​ have joined forces with the newly founded Route Server Support Foundation (RSSF) to tackle the lack of open source software suitable for high-end mission critical Route Server deployments. The ultimate goal of the cooperation is the improvement of the BGP software diversity and the strengthening of open source BGP implementations.

CORAL GABLES, FL., March 17, 2021 -- Confluence Networks LLC today announced that MasTec Inc. (NYSE: MTZ) has acquired an equity interest in Confluence, a Florida-based developer of undersea fiber-optic communications systems. The investment will allow the company to complete development and construction of Confluence-1, the first undersea cable system dedicated to linking strategic global communications nodes on the East Coast of the United States, including: New York, NY; Miami, FL; Virginia Beach, VA; and Jacksonville, FL; and opening a new strategic node in Myrtle Beach, SC.

Cyprus, Greece and Israel energy ministers signed recently a historic cooperation MoU to build the world's longest and deepest underwater power cable, the Euro-Asia Interconnector which will traverse the Mediterranean seabed and connect Cyprus into the European power network for the first time, as well as Israel. The Euro-Asia Interconnector project will cost about $900 million (€760 million),  partly financed by the European Union.