The DARE1 consortium comprising Djibouti Telecom and Somtel and its supplier SubCom announced in later March the completion of marine survey for the Djibouti Africa Regional Express 1 (DARE1) submarine cable system. The DARE1 cable route has been also finalized, adding a new cable landing station in Bosaso, Somalia. The DARE1 cable system will be deployed with 40 x 300 Gbps DWDM technology.

According to SubCom,  H2 Cable and SubCom signed on Tuesday the contract for the supply and installation of the H2 submarine cable system. The H2 cable will be the first to connect Australia and Hong Kong with direct access to China. The H2 cable system is designed with for a number of branching units that can be deployed to locations including Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Island, Guam, Queensland, Hawaii and Los Angeles.

Mr. Rémi Galasso, Founder and CEO at Hawaiki Cable Limited just announced breaking news at Linkedin today, H2 cable system supply contract has been awarded to SubCom and signed today in New Orleans at SubOptic 2019 by H2 CEO Georges Krebs. H2 cable system will be the first direct cable between Sydney and Hong Kong (9,200km), with a branch to Los Angeles (12,500km). H2 cable will provides optimal diversity with existing Hawaiki cable.

15 submarine cables land in India and cater to international connectivity requirements. The number looks reasonably impressive, but their readiness and economic longevity to meet the hyperscale requirements does not evoke confidence. The majority built by large telco consortiums were developed over the last two decades to meet collective requirements of the consortium members, and they were the exclusive landing parties in their respective home countries. The four well-known telco carriers that are landing party in India have had a blissful journey activating STM1/STM4/STM16 links for their walled gardens of business and leveraged the regulatory framework to their advantage.

IX Reach announced recently its partnership with Djibouti Data Center for its networkexpansion into East Africa. IX Reach is the leading provider of SDN cloud connectivity, remote peering and Ethernet services to more than 170 global locations. Djibouti Data Center is the first and only Tier 3 carrier neutral data center in east Africa with direct access to all major international and regional cable systems connecting Africa to Europe, Middle Eastern, and Asian markets.

EMACOM and the EllaLink Group announced on Tuesday that their partnership on the EllaLink cable system has extended further in order to meet the growing capacity demands of the islands of Madeira. EMACOM currently own a dedicated fiber pair on the EllaLink system which is designed to carry over 24Tbps of traffic. New plans under discussion propose to increase the number of direct fiber pairs between Funchal and mainland Portugal in order to provide EMACOM with additional capacity in excess of 70Tbps.

Bulk Infrastructure announced recently that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has signed an agreement for the use of Bulk´s ownership in the HAVFRUE trans-Atlantic submarine cable and subsequent carrier neutral Data Center facilities. The HAVFRUE subsea cable system comprises a trunk cable connecting New Jersey, USA to the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark and branches to Ireland and Norway, with a system capacity of 108Tbps.

Network Atlas is a great non-for-profit services designed to help provide a more accurate accounting of the world's network grid, founded by Mr. Mehmet Akcin. Network Atlas is a crowd-sourced near real-time map of the global Internet infrastructure detailing the world's submarine and terrestrial networks in real time. Users can add networks to the map, update listings with more accurate information and use the atlas'​ near real-time data to track outages and identify possible areas of expansion. 

How much capacity can be transported in a single fiber pair? In a recent trial on Verizon's real-world environment network in Dallas, it demonstrates the capability to transport 35.4Tbps over a 80km single fiber pair, using Cisco Network Convergence System NCS1004 equipment, operating with 600G coherent DWDM technology. The trial also demonstrates the following maximum capacities per fiber pair in different scenarios:

• 25.6Tbps @ 400G over 800km with 75Ghz spacing
• 32Tbps @ 500G over 400km with 75Ghz spacing
• 35.4Tbps @ 600G over 80km with 81.25Ghz spacing

According to Cisco's blog by Bill Gartner, the Cisco NCS 1004 has been in numerous trials since December of 2018, demonstrating multi-haul transmission. The NCS 1004 offers the flexibility to optimize for higher wavelength capacity or for fiber efficiency to support a wide range of customer applications. Cisco NCS 1004 can transport any trunk rate between 100 and 600-Gbps wavelengths on the same platform through software provisioning. With 64 channels of 600G DWDM at 75Ghz, the NCS 1004 provides 38.4Tbps in 16RU, unparalleled scale and density.

According to Huawei Marine, the second stage of upgrade on the WACS (West African Cable System) submarine cable system (WACS Upgrade II) was completed in Feb., 2019. The WACS Upgrade II realized 32*100G wavelengths configured on the longest optically amplified single fiber span stretching 11500km from South Africa to Portugal.

Paratus Africa has announced that it has activated additional capacity between West Africa Undersea Cable System (WACS) and Lusaka, Zambia. This follows the recent Paratus Trans Kalahari Fibre project that was built between the WACS landing station in Swakopmund, Namibia and the Zambian Sesheke border.

NEW YORK, March 11, 2019 – DE-CIX, the world’s leading Internet Exchange (IX) operator with the fastest-growing IX in the New York metro area, and Seaborn Networks (“Seaborn”), a leading developer-owner-operator of subsea fiber optic cable systems, today announce that Seaborn has established an interconnection to DE-CIX New York enabling turn-key direct access from Seabras-1.  Seabras-1, built, owned and operated by Seaborn, is a fully operational 6-fiber pair, 72Tbps submarine cable system between Brazil and the U.S offering the lowest latency path between São Paulo and the NY metro area.

Following the landing at Deep Water Bay in Hong Kong in March 2018, PLCN landed at Dockweiler Beach in Los Angeles in November 2018. With tremendous efforts from professional teams of PLDC and the PLCN parties, PLCN has achieved one and another milestone. Being the first cable connecting Hong Kong and US directly, the first C+L bands technology enabled submarine cable system in the world and the largest capacity submarine cable across the Pacific Ocean, PLCN is coming in-service in 2019.

In December last year I published an article on submarine cable landscape set to unfold in India in 2019-21. An afterthought stayed on thereafter - why is growth of new submarine cables abysmally slow in India, despite skyrocketing growth in data consumption. The answer may not be straightforward, given the number of intertwined variables involved. One key reason is, submarine cables and their landing in the last 15 years have been under monopolistic control of telco carriers, whose dominance manifested primarily as duopoly of the two leading providers and that possibly throttled the growth of submarine cables.