The local authority of the French overseas territory of French Guiana, Collectivite Territoriale de Guyane (CTG), has issued an invitation for a tender for the establishment and operation of a submarine cable aiming to connect French Guiana to Europe. The proposed link will land at Kourou, with an optional landing point at Saint Laurent-du-Maroni. The tender process will be managed by the Societe Publique Locale pour l’Amenagement Numerique de la Guyane (SPLANG), a local public company with a majority government shareholding which is in charge of managing and operating electronic communications infrastructure deployed by its members. The deadline for the submission of bids is 21 September 2016.
Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) – one of the members of the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) consortium – has announced the successful landing of the high-capacity submarine cable in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The 25,000km network – which has a design capacity of 40Tbps – will connect Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and Europe, and is scheduled to be ready for service (RFS) by Q4 2016.
Australia’s Trident Subsea Cable has announced that it has chosen Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX) datacentres in Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore and Jakarta for its submarine cable’s PoPs. Trident is planning to deploy a submarine cable – scheduled to be ready for service (RFS) in 2018 – which will connect Singapore, Indonesia and Australia. Trident will construct a new submarine cable from Perth to Onslow (both Australia) and onward via a new branching unit to Indonesia, where it will join the Matrix Cable System. Branching units will be installed on the new section of the cable from Onslow and south of the Sunda Straight (Indonesia). The Trident system’s four fibre pairs will each be capable of carrying multiple 100Gbps optical channels.
Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Information has signed a contract with a consortium comprising Jakarta-based Mora Telematika Indonesia (Moratelindo), Inti Bangun Sejahtera Tbk (IBST) and Smart Telecom for the construction of the eastern section of the Palapa Ring Project II, DealStreetAsia reports. Under the concession, the consortium will be responsible for connecting East Nusa Tenggara, Maluku, West Papua and Papua with 6,300km of fibre-optic cable. TeleGeography notes that the IDR14 trillion (USD1 billion) Palapa Ring II infrastructure project, which is scheduled to be completed in 2018, will comprise the deployment of 11,000km of undersea fibre-optic cables across the archipelago’s 33 provinces. The planned network will comprise three sections: western, central and eastern, with the Pandawa Lima consortium – consisting of LEN, Teknologi Riset Global Investama, Sufia Techologies, Bina Nusantara Perkasa and Multi Kontrol Nusantara – awarded the contract for the deployment of the central portion of the project, linking Kalimantan, Sulawesi and North Maluku via 2,700km of cabling. Meanwhile, in March 2016 Palapa Ring Barat – a consortium consisting of Moratelindo and Ketrosden Triasmitra – won the contract for the construction of the western section of the Palapa Ring Project II, comprising the deployment of 2,000km of fibre-optic cable connecting Riau province, the Riau Islands and the Natuna Islands. Earlier this week, the Palapa Ring Barat consortium signed a IDR875 billion loan with Bank Mindiri for the fibre deployment in the western part of the country.
Peru will have a total of eight regional fibre-optic backbone networks operational by mid-2017, TeleSemana writes. The networks in Lambayeque – being rolled out by Movistar – Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Apurimac (all being installed by Gilat Networks) are expected to be completed by the end of the year, whilst systems in Cusco (also Gilat), Piura, Tumbes and Cajamarca are set to go live between January and June 2017. The networks will be incorporated into the National Fibre-Optic Backbone (Red Dorsal Nacional de Fibra Optica, RDNFO) – alongside 13 other projects, including initiatives in Ica, Lima, Puno, Junin and Amazonas. The USD333 million RDFO project involves the installation, operation and maintenance of around 13,500km of fibre-optic cables connecting 22 regional capitals and 180 provincial capitals.
DYXnet Group has established a 10Gbps backbone ring throughout Greater China’s major cities including Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei. The carrier-neutral network service provider now has more than 200 PoPs in 57 cities throughout Greater China, Singapore and Vietnam. Going forward, DYXnet plans to add another two cities to its footprint by establishing PoPs in San Francisco (US) and Frankfurt (Germany) in the next six to twelve months. DYXnet founder and CEO Lap Man said: ‘Our global carrier clients continue to expand business operations and upgrade their bandwidth requirements to run mission-critical applications on our reliable, scalable and resilient network.’
Lastly, eww ITandTEL, the telecoms arm of Austrian utility company eww ag, is upgrading its backbone network with Ciena’s 6500 Converged Packet Optical platform. The 100G upgrade – deployed in cooperation with Ciena’s partner Kapsch BusinessCom – will allow eww ITandTEL to extend its carrier wholesale services and support ISPs with high-bandwidth connections and peering through its international and local exchanges in Vienna and Frankfurt with new high-capacity services.
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