Japan’s NTT Communications has announced that the Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE) system will be extended to Cambodia, in a move that represents the deployment of the country’s first ever submarine cable. The 7,800km ASE system is routed away from the Bashi Channel and the south coast of Taiwan, areas that frequently experience earthquakes and typhoons. It also takes the shortest route of any submarine cable connecting Japan to Hong Kong and Singapore. TeleGeography notes that the announcement comes at a time when two other international submarine cable projects are vying to become the first to connect Cambodia; the Malaysia-Cambodia-Thailand (MCT) Cable is expected to go live in 1Q15, while Asia Africa Europe-1 (AAE-1) is expected to be ready for service in 2016. Both cables will land in Sihanoukville. The ASE is owned by NTT Communications, Telekom Malaysia, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) and StarHub of Singapore.
Liquid Telecom has completed the build of the East Africa Fibre Ring which connects Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and loops back into Kenya; creating the first fully redundant regional fibre ring. Going forward, the completion of the East Africa Fibre Ring will ensure that Liquid Telecom customers will not be affected by the kind of fibre cuts, which have blighted users in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda, and Rwanda up to now. The new fibre ring forms part of Liquid Telecom’s pan-African fibre network, which it claims is the largest single fibre network on the continent, spanning more than 17,000km across country borders and connecting areas where no fixed network has existed before.
Submarine cable operator Hawaiki will use Equinix’s SY3 datacentre in Sydney to land its USD350 million 14,000km trans-Pacific cable system, it has been revealed. Hawaiki had already selected landing sites in the US and New Zealand for the under-construction system, and hinted at the Equinix deal last November. The cable system is expected to go live in early-2016, and is being designed and installed by cable systems vendor TE SubCom.
South Sudan’s Minister of Telecommunication and Postal Services, Rebecca Joshua, has said that the country aims to connect to an international fibre-optic cable system through Eritrea, Ethiopia or Kenya within the next year, local news source Radio Tamazuj reports. During a speech at the opening of a new ministry building, Ms Joshua said the move will bring high speed internet to the country, adding that ‘once installation is complete, all government ministries, departments and agencies from the national to the state level will have reliable internet communications.’
Chinese vendor ZTE has been selected by Telkom Indonesia to upgrade its Java backbone, delivering a ten-fold capacity increase across most of the network, from 10Gbps to 100Gbps. Spanning the entire island of Java, from West Java to East Java, and connecting all major cities on the island, the new backbone is said to be the busiest network in Indonesia, and accounts for the largest total exchange capacity.
Indonesian wholesale bandwidth provider TransIndonesia Network has chosen the Coriant 7090 Packet Transport Platform to support packet-based multiservice capabilities in the access and aggregation segments of its fibre-optic network in Jakarta, the vendor has confirmed. TransIndonesia Network operates long-haul and metro fibre-optic networks that serve the major cities and other high-growth areas of Indonesia. The company’s infrastructure includes 6,000km of optical network that connects 68 cities.
According to TMT Finance, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, is considering helping to fund a new project overseen by the Libyan Post Telecommunications & Information Technology Company (LPTIC) to help optimise the operator’s national network. In other news, the IFC has also been linked to an as-yet-unconfirmed USD92 million broadband initiative in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
We welcome your feedback about the Cable Compendium. If you have any questions, topic suggestions, or corrections, please email editors@commsupdate.com