Omantel and Emirates Integrated Telecommunication Company (Du) have announced plans for a new fibre-optic pair between the Sultanate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), called the Oman Emirates Gateway (OEG). The 275km OEG will link two international data centres – Equinix MC1 in Barka (Oman) and Datamena DX1 in Dubai (UAE). Talal Al Mamari, CEO of Omantel, said: ‘This direct and dedicated corridor will synergise the goals of Omantel as the global wholesale hub and of du as the regional data hub, bringing huge benefits to our Wholesale and Enterprise customers. Both companies will also be able to further expand their networks with higher efficiency and improved connectivity which will result in a significant positive impact in terms of services quality and product variety.’
SEACOM has announced it has gone live on Google’s Equiano submarine cable following the system’s landing in Cape Town (South Africa) in August 2022. This comes after SEACOM fulfilled the necessary equipment and installation requirements with the help of its technology partner Infinera. The 15,000km Equiano system, which runs from Portugal to South Africa along the African coast of the Atlantic Ocean, was deployed by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN); it has a design capacity of 144Tbps, with landing points in Namibia, Nigeria, Portugal, Saint Helena, Togo, South Africa and Portugal. Nick Walden, Infinera Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, said: ‘Infinera is delighted to partner with SEACOM to light the Equiano subsea cable with our industry-leading ICE6 800G technology … With the industry’s highest spectral efficiency, ICE6 enables SEACOM to maximise the number of high-speed services they can offer, providing multiple terabits of capacity on this critical subsea link.’
An official investigation has been launched into two aspects of the IRIS submarine cable project, which went live earlier this month. The EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA), which is a regulatory body of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), a grouping of four non-members of the European Union (EU), will investigate whether the government of Iceland was required to pay for seabed research and whether it should have invested in the cable, which is owned by Farice. The investigation commenced after Syn lodged a complaint to the ESA, saying: ‘the payments from the Icelandic state to Farice amounted to state aid which neither had been notified to nor approved by ESA. Farice received public service compensation from the Icelandic authorities, including compensation for costs related to surveys conducted in preparation for a possible third submarine cable.’ The IRIS submarine cable system is 1,750km in length and features a six-fibre pair trunk with a total system capacity of 108Tbps, with each fibre pair delivering 18Tbps.
Infinera has revealed that the Australia Japan Cable (AJC) is the first to trial Infinera’s advanced coherent algorithms for next-generation optical engines. The trial was conducted over a 7,289km segment of the AJC cable system between Paddington, New South Wales (Australia) and Tumon Bay (Guam). The trial delivered a 17% increase in total fibre pair capacity compared to the current generation of optical engine deployed in AJC’s network. The trial tested advanced modulation, forward error correction (FEC), and nonlinear compensation algorithms. The 12,700km AJC cable system, which connects Australia, Guam and Japan, was certified ready for service (RFS) in 2001.
Infinera and Hawaiki Cable have announced the successful completion of a trial on the Hawaiki submarine cable system. Leveraging Infinera’s ICE6 800G coherent optical solution, the trial achieved real-time submarine spectral efficiency of more than 4.5 bits per second per hertz (b/s/Hz) on an uncompensated cable spanning 15,000km and connecting Australia and the US.
Papua New Guinea’s (PNG’s) government has received financial support from China to fund the repair of the Kumul Submarine Cable Network (KSCN), W Media writes. China provided USD3.47 million in support, after the island was struck by a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in mid-September. Following the earthquake, several breakages were detected between 17km and 170km outside of Madang on the PIPE Pacific Cable-1 (PPC-1) and the KSCN.
Ciena has highlighted that Colt Technology Services (Colt) is now able to run high-capacity services across long distances spanning more than 500km using Ciena’s coherent technology. With Ciena’s 6500 Reconfigurable Line System (RLS), Waveserver 5 compact interconnect platform powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e) coherent optics, and Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller, the upgrade more than doubles Colt’s network capacity.
Telxius has installed two new scrubbing centres in Latin America to strengthen protection against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks on its network. One of the new mitigation centres is located on the Pacific coast, in Lurin (Peru), while the other is on the Atlantic coast, in Santos (Brazil). These two scrubbing centres add to Telxius’ existing mitigators in the US and Europe and take advantage of the company’s low-latency high-availability submarine cable infrastructure for traffic handling. The Telxius network spans over 82,000km of submarine fibre-optic cables, including seven next-generation systems: MAREA, BRUSA, Dunant, Tannat, Junior, South Pacific Cable System (SPSC)/Mistral and the recently announced AMX-3/Tikal. Telxius also has a Tier-1 international IP network offering direct internet connectivity to major carriers and ISPs, with a capacity of more than 20Tbps.
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