Cable Compendium: a guide to the week’s submarine and terrestrial developments

Construction work on the 20,000km SeaMeWe-5 submarine cable system linking Marseille and Singapore has been completed. SeaMeWe-5 connects 16 countries across three continents – France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Djibouti, Oman, UAE, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore – offering 100Gbps DWDM technology and capacity of 24Tbps on three fibre pairs. It has carrier neutral PoPs at its main endpoints, located at Marseille (operated by Interxion), Palermo (Sicily) and Singapore (operated by Equinix and Global Switch). The SeaMeWe-5 consortium is made up of Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCCL), China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, China United Network Communications, Djibouti Telecom (DT), Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (du), Myanmar Post and Telecom (MPT), Ooredoo Group, Orange Group, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin), Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (Singtel), Sparkle, Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), Telecom Egypt (TE), Telekom Malaysia Berhad™, TeleYemen, Turk Telekom International (TTI) and Trans World Associates.

Ooredoo Maldives has revealed that the Domestic Submarine Cable System aiming to link the main islands in the Maldives has landed in Thinadhoo, a week after construction works commenced in Hithadhoo (Addu City). The USD25 million submarine network – which will have six landing stations in Hithadhoo, Thinadhoo, Hulhumale, Kolhufushi, Eydhafushi and Kulhudhuffushi – is expected to go live in January 2017. TeleGeography notes that the Maldives is currently served by three submarine cable networks, namely: Dhiraagu Cable Network (which connects the nation’s main atolls), WARF Submarine Cable (which provides onward connectivity from the Maldives to Sri Lanka and India) and the Maldives-India Dhiraagu-SLT Submarine Cable Network.

The 10,556km Monet submarine cable is now expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2017, following unspecified delays, Brazilian website Convergencia Digital writes. Monet is designed to deliver over 60Tbps of capacity between the cities of Santos and Fortaleza in Brazil and Boca Raton, US; the system was previously scheduled for completion in 2016. The six-fibre-pair system is owned by Brazilian telco Algar Telecom, submarine cable operator Angola Cables, Uruguayan telecoms provider ANTEL and search engine giant *Google*· Vendor TE SubCom has installed three landings for the Monet system, in Fortaleza and Praia Grande (Santos) and Boca Raton (US).

Seaborn Networks has announced the introduction of SeaSpeed, the lowest latency point-to-point solution between Carteret (New Jersey) and Sao Paulo (Brazil), which will be offered over the Seabras-1 submarine cable. Paul Creelman, Business Development Director and Head of Low Latency Sales, said: ‘Seabras-1 was already expected to offer improved latency over the multi-point solutions that currently exist on this route. However, SeaSpeed is an enhanced, proprietary end-to-end solution that offers the fastest path.’ The cable deployment is expected to commence in early Q1 2017, with scheduled ready for service (RFS) date of June 2017.

JT Jersey (formerly Jersey Telecom, JT) has revealed that all three cables cut by a ship dragging its anchor on the seabed in the English Channel in early December have now been repaired and are back in service. As reported by Cable Compendium last week, all communications traffic from JT was routed through a single link to France, the 425km HUGO network owned by Sure, as it was the only cable not affected by the incident.

A submarine cable system owned and operated by Bharti Airtel has been damaged by cyclone Vardah, the Times of India writes. A spokesperson for the company was cited as saying: ‘Due to the severe cyclone at Chennai coast, one of our international undersea cables has been damaged and internet traffic has been partially impacted. As a result, customers in some locations may be experiencing slow internet/data speeds.’ Telecoms infrastructure belonging to a number of other operators – including Vodafone India and Global Cloud Xchange, the subsea unit of Reliance Communications (RCOM) – is also believed to have suffered disruptions.

Avelacom has completed a new segment of its DWDM network, which is designed to be the lowest latency route between London and Moscow. The project includes the deployment of 900km of terrestrial fibre and three new PoPs across Europe – in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Bremen (Germany) and Helsinki (Sweden). The backbone is connected to Cinia’s C-Lion cable in the Baltic sea and Avelacom’s fibre network in Russia. Aleksey Larichev, Managing Director of Avelacom, said: ‘Our recent upgrade cuts up to two milliseconds off to help to support and optimise low latency trading between Europe-Russia. It also leverages access to further markets in Southeast Asia, lowering latency to Tokyo and Shanghai accordingly. Our network testing shows outstanding results: deterministic latency profile, no latency spikes. These are key characteristics for high-performance trading infrastructure.’

Mirait Technologies Australia has entered into a ‘multi-million dollar’ contract with Hawaiki Submarine Cable for the design and construction of a terrestrial cable duct route in Sydney (Australia), linking the landing site in Coogee with the Equinix SY4 data centre in Alexandria. The 14,000km Hawaiki cable will connect Oregon (US) with New Zealand and Sydney, and will allow for optional connectivity to selected Pacific islands along the route. Once completed, in mid-2018, the cable will deliver more than 30Tbps of capacity via TE SubCom’s C100U+ Submarine Line Terminating Equipment (SLTE).

Finally, US-based global cloud networking provider GTT Communications has announced the launch of four new US PoPs in San Diego (California), Detroit (Michigan), Chandler (Arizona) and McAllen (Texas). These new PoPs extend GTT’s Tier 1 global network, thus providing GTT with ‘deeper reach into key US markets, supporting clients’ growing bandwidth requirements and business-critical applications and services.’

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