Baler/Aurora Cable Landing Station

The Aurora Cable Landing Station (also called Baler Cable Landing Station) is located at Baler town, Aurora State, the Philippines. The Aurora CLS (Baler CLS) is built for PLCN landing in the Philippines.

In 2017, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and the state-owned firm Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) signed a landing party agreement with Facebook for the Luzon Bypass Infrastructure project. 

The Luzon Bypass Infrastructure (LBI) project is a government initiative for the National Broadband Plan (NBP) , the first of its kind for the Philippine government to implement by building and operating its own submarine cable landing stations.

Under the agreement, BCDA builds the LBI made up of two cable landing stations and a 250 km long cable network corridor connecting the two cable landing stations, i.e., the Aurora Cable Landing Station (Baler Cable Landing Station) on the east of the Luzon Strait and the San Fernando Cable Landing Station on the west of the Luzon Strait.

The DICT operates the Luzon Bypass Infrastructure and maintain related facilities and provide last mile connectivity in the Philippines for a period of 25 years..

Facebook owns one out of the six fiber pairs in the PLCN cable system. As the first user of the Luzon Bypass Infrastructure project, Facebook lands its PLCN at the Aurora CLS (Baler CLS) and the San Fernando CLS in the Philippines and provides the Philippine government with a spectrum equivalent to at least 2 Tbps.

The Luzon Bypass Infrastructure takes advantage of the Philippine geography, providing a bypass route for international submarine cable owners seeking diversity from the Luzon Strait, which has a history of multiple simultaneous submarine cable breakdowns.