Miami, Florida, March 1, 2020 – Florida International University (FIU), Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa and South African National Research Network (TENET/SANReN), and Angola Cables are pleased to announce the activation of lightpaths initially provisioned at 100Gbps linking North America, South America, and Africa for research and education.

SUB.CO announced on Thursday the Oman Australia Cable (OAC) project has entered contract in force (CIF) with its final system connection expected to be completed in December, 2021. The OAC project will directly connect Muscat, Oman to Perth, Australia. The OAC cable system will be supplied by SubCom.

Southern Cross NEXT is a private fiber-optic submarine cable network connecting Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Tokelau, Kiribati, and the United States. Southern Cross NEXT will complement the existing Southern Cross Cable Network to form a robust Southern Cross ecosystem, strengthening the resilience of connectivity on U.S.-South Pacific routes.

Here is the highlight information about the Southern Cross NEXT cable system.

Altibox Carrier has awarded the subsea installation contract for the Skagenfiber West cable between Larvik and Hirtshals to the Norwegian company Cecon Contracting. Cecon will contract and use Normand Cutter as the main installation vessel.

On January 29, 2020 Google and Facebook filed a request with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for special temporary authority to activate limited portions of the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN). The PLCN links Hong Kong with Los Angeles, and includes branching units to the Philippines and Taiwan. Construction of PLCN was completed in 2019, and reports have estimated the cost to design and build PLCN at USD$400M. The system is now sitting idle.

Altibox Carrier and Xtera announced the construction of a new repeater-based open cable system between Norway and UK, the NO-UK cable system. The NO-UK cable spans 670km connecting Norway (Rennesøy) and United Kingdom (Newcastle), with 8 fiber pairs and 210 Tbps system capacity. 

According to SubCom, The Manutua cable (Manatua – One Polynesia Cable) lay operations were successfully completed in January 2020. The Manutua cable system is on target to be live by June 2020.

According to Indian ZeeNews, the Chennai-A&N Islands Submarine Cable is aimed at being completed by June this year, to offer sufficient capacity through submarine cable connecting the archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar(A&N) islands off India’s east coast.

According to Djibouti Telecom, DARE1 cables have landed in Mogadishu and Bossaso (the two biggest coastal cities in Somalia). The landing of the DARE1 cables in these two important cities demonstrates great progress on DARE1 network which is on schedule to be fully operational by June 2020. The DARE1 consortium is currently composed of Djibouti Telecom, Somtel and Telkom Kenya.

Telxius has announced to join force with Orange on Dunant cable system, to provide each other with terrestrial backhaul extensions in France and in the US. Orange also announced to collaborate with Telxius to offer co-location services for Google’s trans-Atlantic Dunant cable project, to provide and operate mutual terrestrial backhaul extensions at their respective Cable Landing Stations in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, France, and Virginia Beach in the US.

According to Ciena, the Europe India Gateway (EIG) submarine cable system has been upgraded with additional 24.3Tbps capacity, deploying with  Ciena’s  GeoMesh solution, powered by WaveLogic Ai coherent optics. The upgrade allows EIG to utilize flexible, express wavelengths, also known as optical bypass, to reduce operational costs as well as space and power requirements while improving reliability. 

Huawei Marine Networks (HMN) announced the contract to construct a new submarine cable project, the Maldives Sri Lanka Cable system (MSC). The MCS cable system will facilitate a direct connection between the Maldives and Sri Lanka increasing regional capacity and network diversity.

According to The Seattle Times, local residents in an Oregon coastal town Tierra del Mar are trying to stop Facebook from using property in their quiet community to build a landing site for the Jupiter undersea cable connecting the United States, Japan and the Philippine.

As of December 2019, there are 74 FCC licensed submarine cable systems in the US, and 12 pending new submarine cable landing license or renewal applications. The FCC needs to coordinate with other Executive Branch agencies (such as Team Telecom) applications where a foreign citizen or foreign-organized entity, including foreign government, would hold a 10 percent or greater direct or indirect equity or voting interest in the licensee.

Huawei Marine Networks announces that the number of their contracts into force accumulatively reaches over 100, including new build and upgrade projects. In 2019, it has gained 12 contracts, and its annual performance shows a noticeable growth in the recent years. Meanwhile, HMN has applied qualified 16 fiber-pair SDM repeaters as a pioneer and utilized WSS ROADM Branch Unit and Open Cable system in commercial cases.

Infrastructure and institutional investors are increasingly turning their attention to digital infrastructure assets and the global rollout of fibre broadband. Fibre-to-the-home in particular is seen as an essential component of digital transformation and as providing a large pool of investment opportunities.

Though the sector has traditionally been dominated by telecoms players, recent years have seen more interest and deal activity from infrastructure investors and their lenders.