Fort Lauderdale, FL and Menlo Park, CA – September 5th, 2018 – GlobeNet, the leading, fastest growing wholesale provider of telecom infrastructure in the Americas, and Facebook, announce today that they have begun construction of the new submarine cable system GlobeNet announced in May. GlobeNet and Facebook will co-own the system and it will be operated by GlobeNet.

[Fortaleza, Brazil, September 5, 2018]: The South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) consortium announced the completion of the close to 6000km marine installation of its 25-year life- span transatlantic fiber optic subsea cable on September 4^th.  This marks a significant milestone: for the first time, two continents, Africa and Americas, in the Southern Hemisphere are fully connected to their respective landing stations, Kribi in Cameroon and Fortaleza in Brazil. 

The 4th Asia-Pacific Submarine Networks Forum with the theme of “Innovation Driving Future Submarine Networks”, was held in Shenzhen on Wednesday. The forum attracted more than 300 participants from government, financial institutions, consultants, major telecom operators in Asia Pacific, Africa and China, and well-known Chinese Internet companies Alibaba and Tencent. 

With the flick of a switch, Vocus Communications’ $US170m Australia Singapore Cable was today connected to the company’s terrestrial network, providing the country with a massive increase in capacity into the Asian region. Vocus Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Kevin Russell, said the Vocus team was finalising its testing phase for the cable system to be Ready for Service on 14 September, when customers will be able to enjoy the newest, fastest and most direct connectivity route into Asia.

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 29, 2018 -- PEACE Cable International Network Co., Ltd. (PEACE Cable) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and landing party agreement with Pakistan network service provider Cybernet and Djibouti Telecom during the 4th Asia-Pacific Submarine Networks Forum. Remaining landing party agreements will also be signed within the next two weeks, representing a key milestone in the delivery plan which includes the permit application work in each country.

According to Telxius, the11,000 km BRUSA submarine cable system linking Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza (Brazil) with San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Virginia Beach (USA), is now open for business. With its ultrafast transmission capacity reaching up to 138 Tbps, BRUSA is the highest capacity subsea cable connecting the Americas.

[Tianjin, China, August 23, 2018] Huawei Marine and Megacable announced that work is underway on marine survey for the Topolobambo – La Paz project. The submarine cable system will provide more stable and low-latency communication for La Paz, Mexico’s second largest tourist destination.

By this autumn, two new undersea cables – SACS and SAIL - will connect Africa to South America and the USA. Whilst all new fibre capacity to the continent is to be welcomed, these routes will need to find something more than just national demand to be feasible. Russell Southwood looks at what each cable promises and the likely downward pressure on international wholesale prices.

There are well recognised benefits to developing economies from investing in connectivity. However, the most pressing problems with facilitating the creation of new business and economic growth is a lack of the legacy infrastructure that has slowly been built in developed economies over the past 150 years. These infrastructure requirements include railway lines, highways, ports, telecommunication facilities and subsea cables, upon which the modern internet is built.

According to GlobeNet,  it plans the deployment of a new 2,500 km submarine cable that will link Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires. This new infrastructure will connect Argentina to the GlobeNet network in Brazil, effectively linking the Southern Cone of South America to the United States and the world.

According to Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), Equinix and Telxius are working together on U.S. facilities and services for the next-generation cable landing station architecture for the MAREA and BRUSA cable systems. The two subsea cables will terminate in the U.S. directly into the MAREA and BRUSA cable landing station located in Virginia Beach, VA, and the capacity will extend the backhaul capacity into Equinix DC2 International Business Exchange™ (IBX^®) data center, representing the newest innovative design in subsea cable infrastructure.

One can never have too much capacity or too low a cost; these have been two significant drivers in telecoms for quite some time. The desire for as much capacity as possible pushed Xtera (www.xtera.com) to develop all-Raman terrestrial systems with 100 nm bandwidth and great reach. However, the high power requirements of all-Raman technology made it applicable mainly to terrestrial and unrepeatered subsea systems. For repeatered subsea systems, Xtera combines low-power Raman with EDFA to get the benefits of both technologies.

So Subpartners and Superloop are busily progressing the Indigo cable system project and there has been tremendous progress over recent weeks. A huge milestone was reached in mid July with Alcatel's Ile De Brehat cable laying ship departing Calais in France with over 7000km of cable and repeaters destined for an area near Christmas Island via Singapore. From there it will begin laying the cable in August 2018 down the Western Australian coast to Perth before continuing through to Sydney!

Virginia Beach is now a hot site for submarine cable landing, hosting MAREA, BRUSA, SAEx1 and Dunant submarine cable systems.

Microsoft and Facebook partnering with Telxius landed their 160Tbps MAREA cable system at the Virginia Beach Cable Landing Station (CLS) site at 1900 Corporate Landing Parkway in Virginia Beach.

In the latest years Marseille has become one of the key Mediterranean data hubs. The exponential increase in demand for data in Africa, Middle East and Asia has attracted data center providers and operators to establish this area as one of their key connectivity hubs for all the traffic into and out of the European region.

MAREA, the highest capacity submarine cable to ever cross the Atlantic, lands in the north of Spain (Bilbao) and connects to the most important European backbones reaching the most relevant connectivity hubs including Marseille.

The Management Committee of the AAE-1 Consortium, made up of 19 global telecommunications operators, has appointed Giuseppe Sini, Head of Retelit International Business Unit, as the Vice Chairman of the AAE-1 Management Committee. The Retelit manager chaired the recently held Management Committee Meeting held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.