According to the FCC public notice, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved the submarine cable landing license for the Southern Cross NEXT cable system as of July 16, 2020. Pacific Carriage Limited Inc. (PCLI), the US landing party of the South Cross Next, filed the application for cable landing license on August 9 2019. It took the FCC and the Executive Branch of the United States Government (also known as Team Telecom) less than 12 months to review and grant cable landing license for the Southern Cross NEXT cable system. 

Google announced Tuesday the investment of a new subsea cable—Grace Hopper—which will run between the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain, providing better resilience for the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products. SumCom is the supplier and turn-key contractor for the Grace Hopper cable. And the Grace Hopper cable project is expected to be completed in 2022.

Cinturion Corp Ltd. (Cinturion) announced a major milestone advancing the Trans Europe Asia System (TEAS), a new generation of data transport infrastructure which will serve the rapidly growing requirements of the markets between Europe and India. Stonecourt Capital, an investment firm based in New York, will collaborate with Cinturion to develop the TEAS cable system. 

Rostelecom PJSC announced on Friday that it has launched a new TEA NEXT project, to construct a new generation fiber-optic communication line connecting Russian western and eastern borders under a working title TEA NEXT. The TEA NEXT will offer 96 dark fiber cores (48 fiber pairs), the first offering of dark fiber across Russia. Rostelecom has found a new special purpose company Atlas to develop and operate the TEA NEXT project which will cost about US$500.

In a blog post by Google Global Networking experts Valey Kamalov and Mattia Cantono on Friday,  Google unveiled a recent experiment using its subsea cables to detect earthquakes and tsunamis. Google has developed a technique which is capable of dectecting earthquakes and tsunamis over tens of thousands of kilometers away, using current in-service subsea cables and equipment that is present on the vast majority of the world’s existing subsea cable systems.

NO-UK Com AS and Altibox Carrier announced that the marine survey for the NO-UK submarine fibre cable between Newcastle and Stavanger is now underway. Since the contract came into force in February 2020, the permits required to commence the offshore survey activities have been obtained by Xtera and the MV Fugro Galaxy has now started survey operations in the North Sea.

Crosslake Fibre announced on Tuesday its newest subsea cable project, CrossChannel Fibre. The historic, next-generation 550km cable is the first fibre-optic subsea cable to be built across the English Channel in nearly twenty years and will connect Slough, United Kingdom and Paris, France. This new subsea cable is designed to support the increase in bandwidth requirements from telecoms, enterprises, content providers, as well as financial, gaming, and media companies that require high capacity, low latency connectivity. The high fibre count, non-repeatered system will contain 96 fibre pairs, each providing over 20 terabits per second of capacity throughput, and will be ready for service in the fall of 2021.

Sparkle and Ciena announced on Monday the upgrade of Sparkle’s fiber pair on the Curie submarine cable system connecting Chile to the US. The upgrade was deployed with Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e), the industry’s first 800G programmable solution, resulting in an ultimate capacity of up to 19Tbps on Sparkle's fiber pair on the Curie cable system, using 400Gbps and 450Gbps wavelengths, operating at 95Gbaud.

According to the FCC public notice, the FCC granted the application of submarine cable landing license for the Jupiter cable system on July 6, 2020. The FCC granted the application upon coordinating with the Department of State and other Executive Branch agencies. The applicants and the licensees of the Submarine Cable Landing License for the Jupiter cable system include: (1) NTT America, Inc. (NTTAmerica), (2) NTT Worldwide Telecommunications Corporation (NTT WT), (3) Edge Cable Holdings USA, LLC (Edge USA), (4) HKT Global(Singapore) Pte. Ltd (PCCW Global), (5) PLDT, Inc., (PLDT), (6) SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank), and (7) Amazon Data Services, Inc. (ADSI).

Singapore, 6 July 2020 – RTI Connectivity Pte. Ltd. (RTI) and NEC Corporation (NEC) jointly announced the successful completion of the Japan-Guam-Australia North Cable System (JGA North). JGA North is approximately 2,700 kilometers in length and lands in Minami-Boso, Japan and Piti, Guam. The cable has an initial design capacity of 24 terabits per second (24 Tbps) minimum, increasing to 30 Tbps in the coming year.

Dublin, Ireland and Funchal, Madeira, Portugal – 29 June 2020 Seismology, volcanology, marine ecology, and oceanic conditions are key to understanding the future of our planet. EllaLink is proud to contribute to such understanding by launching the EllaLink GeoLab initiative which aims to provide the scientific community with real-time, accurate and relevant data on seabed conditions. This initiative will be the first dedicated facility of its kind as part of a telecoms submarine cable.

HC2 Holdings, Inc. (“HC2”), the legacy controlling company of Global Marine Group (GMG), announced recently the completion of the sale of its 30% stake in Huawei Marine Networks Co., Limited (“HMN”) to Hengtong Optic-Electric Co Ltd (“Hengtong”). The 30% interest in Huawei Marine Networks was sold for $85 million. Huawei Marine Networks has an enterprise value of US$285 million. Huawei Marine Networks is now owned by Hengtong (81%) and HC2 (19%) subject to a two-year put option. According to GMG, it has fully divested stake in Huawei Marine Networks.

Huawei Marine Networks (HMN) announced the completion of the marine survey for the Maldives Sri Lanka Cable (MSC) system that connects Hulhumale, an island in the Maldives archipelago, to Mount Lavinia in Sri Lanka. The MSC system will be completed by the end of 2020.

According to press release from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) of Egypt, the Minister Amr Talaat has issued a decree appointing Mohamed Nasr Eldin Mohamed Ali the Assistant ICT Minister for Global Information Infrastructure (GII) for one year. Nasr Eldin is a respectful verteran in developing and running submarine cable systems, global telecommunication networks and the Internet. He was the Head of Subsea Cable Infrastructure at PCCW Global prior to this appiontment, and headed International Business Unit at Telecom Egypt for years prior to his roles at PCCW Global. He contributed a lot and work extensively for the PEACE cable, the AAE-1 cable and other subsea cables.

Arc, a joint venture launched by du and Batelco, has been appointed by Emergent Telecommunications LL (Emergent) as the lead consultant for the Orient Express submarine cable system. Arc will provide consultancy services related to network configuration, tendering, supply contract negotiation and documentation, and overall project management for the Orient Express cable.