Angola Cables has announced that it has become a Microsoft ExpressRoute partner to meet the needs of Africa-based organisations migrating business applications and IT infrastructures to the cloud and accelerating digital transformation on the continent. Taking advantage of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, Angola Cables has created ACloud Connect to provide dedicated, high-quality connections to a worldwide network of 42 Azure regions offered by Microsoft, and connectivity to Angonap, Angola Cables’ data centre located in Luanda.

Zayo Group Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: ZAYO) announced that it will offer three fully diverse network routes out of Marseille. Marseille serves as a strategic gateway and key aggregation point between Europe, Africa and Asia as well as connectivity for subsea cables AAE-1, SEA-ME-WE-5 and several others. These three fully redundant routes provide businesses and carriers with extensive connectivity options from Marseille throughout Western Europe and North America via Zayo's global network.

Over the last few years, an explosive growth of data and bandwidth has taken place due to the development of data center, cloud computing, and big video services. This is posing higher bandwidth and latency requirements on submarine cables. To meet the requirements, more and faster submarine cables are needed.

In addition, the worldwide demand for connectivity is increasing as cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and mobile Internet continue to develop rapidly. Submarine cables are vital in the effort to create a better connected world. They are the cornerstone for economic development and draw the attention of governments and investors. However, many challenges are involved in the construction of submarine cable networks. Further support from governments and the open collaboration of all players in the industry chain are required to overcome these challenges.

As hybrid cloud becomes more useful, many organizations are looking for hybrid cloud architectures to bridge the gap from the cloud to their own data centers. But with the scale of modern applications and associated data, cloud connectivity requires a lot of bandwidth and some network planning on your side.

As Todd Traver, VP, IT Optimization and Strategy, at the Uptime Institute told us, “Hybrid cloud computing has become the industry norm, with systems-of-record computing taking place in the enterprise data centers, [disaster recovery] taking place in colocation data centers, platform or software-as-a-service being provided by the cloud, and customer-facing applications such as video streaming or virtual reality being provided by edge compute.”

The second submarine cable is supposed to guarantee Bangladesh better international connectivity for the following reasons:

Bangladeshi ISPs are eager for SEA-ME-WE5, the second submarine cable. It lands at Kuakata, the southwestern coastal village, this year. Kuakata is 300 nautical miles away from Cox’s Bazar. The two vastly located undersea cable landing facilities will bolster the country’s international connectivity. They will also salvage Bangladeshi ISPs from the Indian carriers’ oligopoly.

Hengtong Marine is pleased to announce the successful completion of three separate repeatered cable sea trials working in conjunction with Huawei Marine Networks (HMN) the supplier and integrator of the 2FPs and 6FPs repeaters and the power switching  Branching Unit (PSBU) and SBSS who supplied the CS Fu Haias the selected Marine Installation Platform.

 Xtera®, announced on September 25th the award of a contract by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), to build a new regional submarine cable system.  As a valued subsea solution supplier, Xtera provides the most advanced undersea technology available, which is deployed and maintained by the company’s expert professional team.  The new submarine cable system for DISA is designed to deliver high-capacity at the lowest cost per terabit per second.

New Jersey Fiber Exchange (NJFX), the first and only colocation campus to sit at a cable landing station in the U.S and offers Tier 3, carrier neutral data center capabilities, announced on Tuesday its urgent work with major carriers to expedite installation of infrastructure to support a major connectivity hub in jeopardy from Hurricane Irma related power outages.

China Telecom Global (CTG) has announced the launch of 100G service capability via their terrestrial cable system to answer the soaring demands for big-bandwidth connectivity between Asia and Europe in collaboration with Russian operators. On the back of the launch of the Super TSR (Transit Silk Road), an ultra low latency terrestrial route via the China-Kazakhstan Gateway, this initiative further diversifies CTG's product portfolio along the Europe-Asia route, offering 147ms from Shanghai to Frankfurt and 159ms from Hong Kong to Frankfurt.

According to VBN, Internet users in Vietnam will continue to experience slow connection speeds due to further delay on AAG cable repair, while the repair on the country’s other internet link, the Intra Asia (IA) cable, is ongoing.

NJFX, the first Tier 3 carrier-neutral colocation campus that intersects where subsea cables from the United States, South America, Europe and the Caribbean meet, announced on Mondy the expansion of its colocation campus in Wall, New Jersey. By expanding its campus an additional 48 acres, NJFX emphasizes its commitment to developing a tenant-driven community with purpose-built colocation and disaster recovery space, as well as its ability to accommodate space for future independent cable landing stations.

Retelit announced today its interest in the Mediterranean, joining the “Open Hub Med” (OHM) project, with an investment of Euro 100,000.00 for acquisition of 9.52% of the consortium share capital.

H.I.G. Capital (“H.I.G.”), a leading global private equity investment firm with over €20 billion of equity capital under management, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired substantially all the assets of Xtera Communications, Inc (“Xtera”), a provider of innovative and bespoke sub-sea fiber optic solutions. H.I.G. previously provided debtor-in-possession financing to the Xtera debtors in connection with the chapter 11 case.

Colt announced on Tuesday a major revamp of their advanced fibre optic network, as well as extensive Layer 2 network expansion in Japan. This will enable high-bandwidth services with speeds ranging from 10Gbps up to 100Gbps on mass scale, with greater routes and diversity. The phased expansion of both available services and coverage areas is slated to begin in January 2017.

Hibernia Networks announced the expansion of its global network platform to deliver the lowest latency connectivity from Chicago to Moscow, Russia and Mumbai, India, two vital financial hubs. In addition to these new routes, improved latency performance to Dubai, UAE is now offered directly to the Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange, strengthening Hibernia Networks’ low latency service for this emerging center of financial markets activity in the Middle East.

Huawei and PT.LEN Telekomunikasi Indonesia (LTI) today announced an agreement to design and construct a portion of the Palapa Ring project in Indonesia. The Palapa Ring is a broadband network project that is led by Indonesian government for the purpose of increasing broadband penetration in the more remote areas in Indonesia. It consists of three separate sections; dubbed the West, Middle and East packages.