Didon, Tunisia’s first private submarine cable, has reportedly landed in the coastal town of Kelibia. According to unconfirmed press reports the 170km subsea system could go live as early as next month. Didon, a joint venture between Tunisiana and Orange Tunisia, will link to Interoute’s pan-European fibre-optic network, via its landing station in Mazara del Vallo, Siciliy, Italy. The infrastructure, which was supplied by Alcatel-Lucent, is expected to offer capacity of 8TBps.
TE SubCom has announced that the contract covering the majority of segments of the 25,000km Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) submarine cable has come into force. Each trunk fibre-pair supplied by TE SubCom has a cross-sectional capacity of minimum 80×100Gbps and each branch will be implemented with optical add/drop multiplexing (OADM) nodes containing OADM wavelength re-use technology. The subsea system, which was unveiled in January 2014, will run from south east Asia to Africa and Europe through Egypt, connecting Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti, Qatar, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy and France. The target completion date for the construction of the cable is 2016.
Systems vendor Ciena Corp has partnered with the Japan-US Cable Network to transmit 200Gbps signals over a 630km submarine network segment along the US West Coast. The optical transport community has focused on 16-QAM QAM [Quadrature amplitude modulation] optical modulation as a means of transmitting 400Gbps via coherent transmission, usually via a pair of 200Gbps sub-carriers.
Northwestel, a communications solutions provider based in northern Canada, has chosen Fujitsu Network Communications to supply its long-haul, packet transport, microwave technology to bring broadband connectivity to communities of the Western-Arctic’s Mackenzie Delta area.
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