The owners of the Seabras-1 cable conneting New York and São Paulo, Seabras 1 Bermuda Ltd (“Seabras Bermuda”) and Seabras 1 USA LLC (“Seabras US” and, together with Seabras Bermuda, the “Companies”), filed voluntary petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code (the “Filings”) in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on December 22, 2019, saying that an underwhelming number of customer contracts rendered it unable to make payments on its $150 million in secured debt obligations. Seaborn Networks, the operator of the Seabras-1 cable system, is not part of the Filings and will continue to be the operator of the Seabras-1 cable system throughout the Filings process.

NTT Ltd announced on December 13, 2019 that it will commence the construction of the MIST submarine cable system, a 12 fiber-pair and 240Tbps large-capacity submarine cable conneting Singapore, Myanmar and India (Mumbai and Chennai). Orient Link Pte. Ltd. (Orient Link), a strategic joint venture of NTT, JICT and WEN Capital, will undertake the construction of MIST cable system. The cost of the MIST cable system is approximately USD400million. NTT aims to link its large-scale data centers in Singapore, Myanmar and India with the MIST cable system.

The Coral Sea Cable System (CS²) connects both Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Solomon Islands to the major East Coast Internet Hub at Sydney, Australia. The Coral Sea Cable System (CS²) consists of 4 fibre pairs, with 2 fibre pairs from Sydney to Port Moresby and Honiara, respective capital cities of PNG and the Solomon Islands, yielding up to 20Tbps to each of the South Pacific countries. 

Africa may be a growing hub of digital innovation, particularly noticeable in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Nairobi and Lagos – with companies in these metropolitan areas taking advantage of high-speed fibre connections to embrace the cloud and develop new business models and processes.  These leading-edge companies are connecting with their peers more-and-more at a regional and global level.

Vocus has celebrated the successful completion of the Coral Sea Cable System for the Australian Government. After final testing, the 4,700 km Coral Sea Cable connecting Sydney, Honiara and Port Moresby, and the 730 km Solomon Islands Domestic Network, were accepted by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, a month earlier than planned.

Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP signed recently a multi-million dollar contract with SCCI, providing SCCI with a turn-key solution to connect New Caledonia to Hawaiki, including a subsea branch to the capital city of Noumea and significant capacity on the transpacific cable. Hawaiki cable's new branch to New Caledonia has been named ‘Tomoo’.

PEACE has announced the signing of the Landing Party Agreement for its Kenya landing during Africa Com 2019, in Cape Town, South Africa. The Landing Party Agreement (LPA) was signed on 5 September 2019, with Liquid Telecom and Africa Data Centre. PEACE and Liquid Telecom have also achieved an initial deal on PEACE Kenya route connectivity.

MainOne announced in this week that its the MainOne cable branch to Cote d’Ivoire is in service and is ready to welcome its first customers. MainOne cable landed at the Grand Bassam beach in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire in early October. The MainOne submarine cable is connected to the newly constructed MainOne data centre in Abidjan, purposely built alongside the Abidjan cable landing station. The MainOne data centre in Abidjan is a Tier III-compliant datacenter in Côte d'Ivoire, provides co-location spaces for customers to easily consolidate their IT infrastructure while gaining access to fully redundant power, cooling, operator-level security and fire prevention facilities.

This article takes a closer look at 15 submarine cables facing challenges, that have either prevented them from reaching CIF or the implementation not reaching RFS or operational cables whose mainstream acceptance or economic lifespan is threatened by under-utilization.

According to Djibouti Telecom and Ecofin Agency, Kenya plans to invest $59 million to increase its data capabilities. This fund will be used to deploy an extension of the Djibouti Africa Regional Express (DARE1). Telkom Kenya has participated in the DARE1 consortium as Landing Party in Kenya.

DARE1 consortium comprising Djibouti Telecom, Somtel and Telkom Kenya and its supplier SubCom announced on Wednesday that all manufacturing aspects for the Djibouti Africa Regional Express 1 (DARE1) submarine cable system are complete. The DARE1 cable system includes three branch units off a three fiber-pair trunk, where each pair has a capacity of 40 channels at 300 Gbps.

JGA South consortium comprising AARNet, Google and RTI announced that the Japan-Guam-Australia South subsea cable system (JGA-South) landed at Narrabeen Beach in Sydney on November 27, 2019. AARNet is the Sydney landing party for JGA South, responsible for the cable landing station facilities, shore end work, permits in Sydney. JGA South is on-track to be completed and ready for service by March 2020.

SUB.CO recently announced to build the Oman Australia Cable (OAC) that will directly connect Muscat, Oman to Perth, Australia. SUB.CO has partnered with Omantel on the OAC project and selected Subcom as the turn key supplier. 

Acquisition, ownership and operation of Submarine Fiber Pair is the ultimate futureproof solution for scalable transoceanic connectivity, with design capacity of at least 12T/FP and goes up to 20T/FP, and even beyond. Interestingly that’s more than the total capacity of most of the consortium cables that land in India. Till date Submarine Fiber Pair acquisition was feasible only for the elites, the big-4 OTTs and Reliance Jio.

Angola Cables and Nokia announced at AfricaCom 2019 that they have collaborated to provide a direct optical connection between Africa and North America, by optically interconnecting MONET and South Atlantic Cable System (SACS). And the fiber-optic routing between Sangano in Angola and Boca Raton, Miami in the USA has completed final acceptance trial, with RTD of 123.4ms.

Ciena, Internet2, and Juniper Networks confirmed last successfully passing live traffic over a 1,367-mile (2200km) circuit using a single 400 gigabit Ethernet link between Chicago and Denver, the first such occurrence for an advanced research and education (R&E) network. The live traffic ran cleanly during a trial between StarLight in Chicago and SCinet at the SC Conference in Denver this week on the 400 gigabit Ethernet link connecting two Juniper PTX 10003 core routers.