Intelvision, in collaboration with Vodafone, has landed the 2Africa submarine cable system in the Seychelles. Intelvision CEO Reza Jaro said: ‘With this new cable, we will be able to set our price bar. Currently, we have to buy from the current sea submarine cable, and as such we cannot control the price. We believe that landing our own cable can revolutionise the way the internet is being used in the country today.’ The cable is expected to go live in September 2023.
Elsewhere, the 2Africa consortium announced the successful shore landing of the cable system at Port Said in Egypt earlier this week. Upon completion, the 47,000km system will comprise 16 fibre pairs with a design capacity of 180Tbps, connecting 33 countries in Africa, Europe and Asia via 46 landing locations.
The Lodbrog cable ship has arrived at Papeete (French Polynesia), with plans to commence the deployment of the Natitua Sud cable system aiming to connect Tahiti to the Austral Islands this week. The rollout is scheduled to start from Toahotu towards Rurutu and Tubuai, with a total of 800km to be installed at a depth of 5,000 metres, francetvinfo.fr writes. Project manager Vairani Davio commented: ‘On the terrestrial network at Rurutu and Tubuai, the deployment of FTTH was initiated a few months ago. In principle, we should be able to put into service both the cable and the terrestrial fibre-optic network on the two islands [in July].’
The Taiwanese government is planning to build an internet cable terminal in Tainan and lay two additional undersea cables to boost telecoms resiliency in southern Taiwan, an official familiar with the matter told the Taipei Times. The National Science Council allegedly ordered the National Center for High-Performance Computing to plan a cloud server centre and submarine cable landing point in Tainan, as well as a backup auxiliary node in Taichung, to bolster redundancy and security, following the submarine cable fault in February 2023 that severed two cable systems. The project is scheduled to be completed by 2025, with private-sector entities reportedly also expressing interest.
Nokia and PT. Lintas Teknologi Indonesia (Lintas) have successfully conducted a trial of Nokia’s PSE-V super coherent optics on the 3,551km Indonesia Global Gateway (IGG) submarine cable network, owned and operated by PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin). When deployed, Nokia’s PSE-V super-coherent solution will help Telin increase capacity by around 31% while lowering the total cost of ownership. The trial exceeded the quality benchmark set by Telin and recorded a fibre capacity of 11Tbps in the 2.2THz of optical fibre spectrum. Nokia and Telin recorded a capacity of 500Gbps per channel compared to 400Gbps per channel of the existing equipment.
Zayo Group Holdings has announced a direct network route connecting the cities of Manchester (UK) and New York City (US), via a transatlantic route (understood to be over the Havfrue/AEC-2 submarine system). The route – adding to a network spanning over 16 million fibre miles and 139,000 route miles – avoids backhauling to global internet hubs in London (UK) and Paris (France). By upgrading the Manchester internet gateway and leveraging capacity from its Zeus submarine cable, Zayo has also added a direct route to Amsterdam, giving customers three internet routes from Manchester to the US, Dublin and the Netherlands. These complement the three routes it also has to London.
Lumen Technologies has launched 400G IP transit ports on its tier 1 internet backbone in the US and Europe. The offering is currently available in eight markets and twelve more will be added in 2023, with ‘continued expansions in 2024’.
MTN GlobalConnect (MTN GC), MTN’s wholesale and infrastructure operating company, has announced that its terrestrial fibre reached 105,157km by December 2022, including 32,000km in Nigeria, 27,500km in South Africa, 10,500km in Ghana, 9,418km in Uganda, 5,700km in Zambia, 5,500km in Cote d’Ivoire and 453km in Kenya. The company is aiming to expand its fibre footprint to 135,000km by 2025 on the back of USD500 million in capital expenditure. MTN GlobalConnect also aims for a structural separation of the fibre business from OpCos to be completed in 2023, with subsidiaries operating in five countries by the end of 2022 (Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia and Kenya).
We welcome your feedback about the Cable Compendium. If you have any questions, topic suggestions, or corrections, please email editors@commsupdate.com
The Submarine Cable Map is a free and regularly updated online resource from TeleGeography. Learn more about our range of maps and sponsorship opportunities over here. For more research on long-haul networks and submarine cables, peruse our Global Bandwidth Research Service.