Displaying items by tag: Submarine Cable

Orange proceeded to land Google’s transatlantic Dunant cable in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, in the Vendée region of France, first and terrestrial stage of the laying of this cable.

This new 6,600 km long submarine cable linking the United States to France, posed by the company SubCom and scheduled to come into service before the end of 2020, is the result of a project combining Orange and Google. The Europe-United States axis is one of the most important submarine routes in the world with a need for connectivity that doubles every second year. Dunant will help to meet the explosion in Internet usage and guarantee ever more efficient connections for Orange and Google customers.

As the “Landing Party” and owner of the French part of the cable, Orange has completely refurbished the historic station in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, which was no longer in use, to house the terminal equipment for the Dunant system. This area is a strategic location, close to the main connectivity hubs on this side of the Atlantic. From this landing station, Orange is deploying terrestrial optical fibers in France between Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez and Paris to route its traffic on the Dunant cable to the capital's major data centers and will also provide service to the rest of Europe and major international data centers.

With this deployment, Orange will benefit from two pairs of optical fibers with a capacity of up to 30Tbp/s each, enough to transfer a 1GB video in 30 microseconds. Orange will thus be able to meet the massive growth in demand for data and content exchanged between Europe and the United States for several years to come.

Dunant will be the first submarine cable to connect the United States to France in more than 15 years and will be designed to combine the most advanced technologies from the world's various equipment suppliers. The cable will therefore be able to keep pace with innovation in optical transmission technologies and maintain its performance at the highest level for many years to come.

As a major investor in more than 40 submarine cables, Orange is committed to developing the quality of service of its global network. This new transatlantic project is one of the Group's many operations aimed at providing high-quality services to support its customers in their various uses.

The Hong Kong-Americas (HKA) consortium and Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) have signed a turnkey contract for the deployment of the Hong Kong-Americas (HKA) submarine cable network, which will span more than 13,000 kilometers.

This new open cable system will increase connectivity between Hong Kong and the US and will reinforce Hong Kong’s role as a key communications hub in the Asia-Pacific region. The HKA consortium includes China Telecom, China Unicom, Facebook, Tata Communications, and Telstra as the major parties.

The HKA system will feature six fiber pairs and will connect Chung Hom Kok in Hong Kong to Hermosa Beach in California; additional connectivity options may be exercised in future. Its open design will deliver significant cost benefits as well as enhanced bandwidth availability for telecommunications services and content-based services between Asia and North America. Target completion date for the HKA System is in the year 2020. 

Chung Hom Kok Cable Landing Station is located at Chung Hom Kok in the central island of Hong Kong and is the southernmost cable landing station in Hong Kong. Three cables of the C2C Network land at the Chung Hom Kok Cable Landing Station. In addition, the Southeast Asia Japan cable system lands at this station. The station is owned by Pacnet (Telstra) with Pacnet and China telecom Global providing backhaul.

Leveraging its state-of-the-art subsea technology, the ASN solution will deliver greater diversity of connections, enhanced reliability and network efficiency, as well as enabling optimal connectivity between major data centers in Asia and the USA.
The solution includes ASN's submarine WSS ROADM units, the latest generation of repeaters and will offer high performance and powering resilience, enabling over 80Tb/s transmission capacity. In addition, it is also compatible with future generations of submarine line terminal equipped with Probabilistic Shaping technology.

Philippe Piron, President of Alcatel Submarine Netwoks, said: "We are proud to work with the HKA consortium on this project, which incorporates several innovations from ASN and will be based on the latest high-performance submarine line design. The trust placed upon us by the HKA consortium validates our position as a key player for submarine network infrastructures in the Asia-Pacific region and the reinforcement of our local presence.”

Piron added: “It also provides a strong platform to further demonstrate our commitment in project management and in the development of local relationships to support operators and content providers for their network and capacity expansion strategies."

Telstra said it would invest in a half fiber pair on the Hong Kong Americas (HKA) cable. Telstra said it would also purchase capacity equivalent to 6 terabits per second on the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN), which like HKA will stretch from Hong Kong to the west coast of the US. Google and Facebook are also backing the PLCN.

The PLCN will have a total capacity of around 120 terabits per second and include 12,800 kilometers of fiber. The cables will offer lower latency than the Asia-America Gateway (AAG), which connects South-East Asia to the west coast of the US via Guam and Hawaii.

“Together with the current AAG cable on which Telstra carries the most traffic today, these two investments will provide us with increased capacity across the important Hong Kong to US route, one of the fastest growing routes in the world for capacity demand,” Telstra’s group managing director of global services and international, David Burns, said in a statement.

Global demand for bandwidth continues to grow at a remarkable rate driven by the rise of capacity-dependent applications like live video, augmented and virtual reality, and 4K/8K video. International submarine cable systems are more important than ever, considering that the total carrying capacity of subsea cables is in the terabits per second, while satellites typically offer only 1000 megabits per second.

The concept of sending communication signals through submarine cables dates back to the 1850s when the first submarine communication cables were laid, carrying telegraphy traffic. Subsequent generations of cables have carried telephone traffic, then data communications traffic. Modern subsea cables use optical fiber technology to carry digital data, including telephone, internet and private data traffic.

The importance of subsea cable systems is highlighted by the sheer extent of which the cables have spread across the globe. Typically about 1 inch (25mm) in diameter, submarine cables cover a much broader scope of connectivity than satellites do – as of 2006, overseas satellite links accounted for only 1 percent of international traffic, while the remainder was carried by undersea cable.

There has been increasing demand to expand capacity of subsea cables in the Pacific region in recent years – a switch in demand for cables connecting the Atlantic Ocean which separates Europe and the United States. For instance, between 1988 and 2003, approximately 70 percent of subsea fiber-optic cable was laid in the Pacific. This is in part due to the emerging significance of Asian markets in the global economy.

In early November 2017, the $350 million Hawaiki Transpacific Submarine Cable System began being laid, with the 15,000 Km subsea cable connecting Australia and New Zealand to Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. The project is led by New-Zealand-based Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP and TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity company. Manufacturing for the cable system concluded at SubCom’s Newington, New Hampshire facility in October.

Hawaiki will link Australia and New Zealand to the mainland United States, as well as Hawaii and American Samoa, with options to expand to additional South Pacific islands. Hawaiki will be the highest cross-sectional capacity link between the US and Australia and New Zealand. The carrier-neutral cable system was co-developed by New Zealand-based entrepreneurs Sir Eion Edgar, Malcolm Dick and Remi Galasso.  

TE SubCom has also played a significant role in the implementation of the high-capacity JUPITER transpacific cable system scheduled to launch in 2020. PLDT, NTT Communications, PCCW Global, SoftBank, Facebook and Amazon selected TE SubCom for the project that will connect Maruyama, Japan; Shima, Japan; Los Angeles, California; and Daet, Camarines Norte, Philippines.

“JUPITER will provide the necessary diversity of connections and the highest capacity available to meet the needs of the evolving marketplace,” said Koji Ishii of SoftBank, co-chairperson of JUPITER consortium. “TE SubCom has a proven record of success in the design and implementation of innovative, scalable and robust transoceanic cable systems.”

Sanjay Chowbey, president of TE SubCom, said submarine cables continue to have a critical impact on the global economy, as well as cultural, educational and medical advancement around the world.

“It is our privilege to help facilitate the growth of global connectivity and provide reliable, high-capacity and low-latency transmission to regions where bandwidth is at a premium,” Chowbey said. “We look forward to the next phases of what will be a high quality and industry leading system implementation.” 

The largest telecommunications provider in the Philippines, Globe Telecom, also threw its weight into launching a significant subsea cable system project this year. In August, Globe Telecom launched the US$250 million Southeast Asia-United States (SEA-US) cable system, providing direct links between Davao City and the United States.

The 14,500km cable system uses 100Gbps transmission technology to deliver 20 terabits per second capacity (Tb/s). SEA-US was built by a consortium of seven international telecommunications companies and links five areas and territories that include Manado (Indonesia), Davao (Philippines), Piti (Guam), Oahu (Hawaii, United States), and Los Angeles (California, United States).

“First world connection is more than just fast internet but is also about building a better nation that transcends borders and opens infinite possibilities for everyone,” said Globe President and CEO Ernest Cu during its launch event on August 11. “We are excited about this development because of the immense benefits that the SEA-US undersea cable system will bring to the Philippines.”

Cu added: “For one, it will provide support for the expanding business requirements for data in the Mindanao region where the cable landing station is located and in the country as a whole. This will also ease our dependence on international cable systems and ensure the resiliency of the country’s internet connectivity.”

The link bypasses the Taiwan earthquake zone to ensure uninterrupted connectivity and greater resiliency to prevent an incident similar to a major quake in 2006 where international cables were broken causing the Philippines to be isolated for a few days in terms of internet connection. Cables can be broken by fishing trawlers, anchors, earthquakes, turbidity currents, and even shark bites. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami damaged a number of undersea cables that make landings in Japan.  

Asia’s importance on the global scale was further underlined this year by the launch of the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) cable system launched in July – the world’s largest submarine cable system in more than a decade. It’s the first submarine cable system to link all major Asian, African, Middle Eastern and European regions, combining terrestrial and subsea routes to provide the lowest latency connections.

With a capacity of at least 40 terabits per second across 5 fiber pairs, AAE-1 is designed from the outset with 100Gbps transmission technology, which may be upgraded in the future to fulfill increasing bandwidth demand. Configured with express routes and the minimum number of hops between Points of Presence (PoPs) in Europe and Asia, AAE-1 is the high performance, economic solution for OTTs, international carriers and enterprise businesses. 

Six specialized cable ships and numerous support vessels engaged in completing the installation in the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Gulf of Thailand. Network equipment was deployed and tested at more than half of the AAE-1 cable landing stations. Demand fueled by the economic expansion of countries will elevate AAE-1’s status as critical infrastructure, essential for growth along the route.

The subsea cable system was undertaken by a consortium of leading telecom companies including Etisalat, Mobily, Ooredoo, Omantel, Reliance Jio, Telecom Egypt, China Unicom and PCCW Global. The system connects Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, with Malaysia and Singapore, then onwards to Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy and France.

Another major subsea cable rollout announced this year in July is the pan-Caribbean system which will span nearly 12,000 Km with initial landing points in 12 markets throughout the region, including the Cayman Islands, Curaçao, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Trinidad & Tobago, and Turks & Caicos Islands, with dual diverse landings in the US, which will include the first landing of a cable on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

The Deep Blue Cable will meet an urgent demand for advanced telecom services across the Caribbean. TE SubCom was contracted by Saint Lucia-based Deep Blue, the developer, owner and operator of the system, to build and deploy the cable.

Speaking to Telecom Review back in July, Deep Blue CEO Steve Scott said the Deep Blue subsea cable network will offer an initial capacity of 6 Tb/s per fiber pair and is projected to be completed in Q4 of 2019. It will ensure availability, competitive pricing and capacity resilience, he said. 

“The Deep Blue cable system will play a critical role in serving developing Caribbean countries that are now experiencing a surge in demand for advanced telecom services and currently rely on fiber-optic connectivity that is technologically and economically disadvantaged,” said Scott.

TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company and an industry pioneer in undersea communications technology, announced that it has been awarded the South Pacific Marine Maintenance Agreement (SPMMA), a five-year service agreement between SubCom and 14 cable operators in the region.

Under terms of the agreement, which took effect March 10, 2017, SubCom will maintain more than 51,000 km of cable that comprise 19 disparate telecommunications and power cable systems.  

The SPMMA area covers the South Pacific region from Singapore in the west to Tahiti in the east and from the southernmost point of New Zealand to Hawaii in the north.SubCom will maintain cable systems across more than 28 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean using the cable ship Reliance, based in the South Pacific region.

An experienced crew of dedicated marine professionals will utilize SubCom’s modern marine assets and extensive technology portfolio to ensure quality delivery of maintenance services to the region.

“We are grateful for the opportunity to provide world class maintenance services to our clients in the South Pacific region,” said Chris Carobene, vice president, Marine Services, TE SubCom. “The needs of global cable operators change rapidly, and maintenance providers must be both flexible and innovative throughout the life of an undersea cable system.

“As a result, SubCom continues to invest in our maintenance services, building the infrastructure necessary to respond to our customers’ evolving needs. The SPMMA agreement highlights the demand for new, strategic approaches to maintenance and demonstrates that SubCom is well-positioned to address these challenges,” Carobene added.

Spanish and Brazilian government officials have confirmed that a proposed fiber optic submarine cable between the two countries has been given the go-ahead.

The 9,200 km-long (5,700 mile) Ella-Link, previously known as Eula-Link, will connect to data centers in Madrid, Lisbon and São Paulo, as well as connecting to Fortazela, the archipelagoes of Madeira, Spain’s Canary Islands and Africa’s Cape Verde. A 72Tbps cable, it will be the first fiber optic submarine cable between Europe and Brazil, with the only existing direct link being a 20Gb copper cable laid in 1999.

Ella-Link, a partnership between Spanish submarine cable operator Isla-Link and Brazilian telecoms provider Telebras, will be operator neutral. Alcatel Submarine Networks will be responsible for the project.

The European Commission provided €25 million ($27.2m) in financial support for the cable, as part of its Building Europe Link to Latin America (BELLA) initiative. Current cost estimates were not provided, but when a version of Ella Link was announced by then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2014, it was pegged at $185 million.

During the event to launch the underwater Ella-Link telecommunications cable that took place in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, explained that the new connection will reduce the time to transmit data by 40%, as well as improve the quality, reliability and confidentiality of communications between Ibero-America and Europe.

Rajoy commented that the new cable is “a necessary connection between Europe and Ibero-America” and “an example of public-private cooperation”, in which the European Union has also played a “very important” role, with a contribution of 25 million euros.

Rajoy also pointed out that the new underwater cable, which connects the cities of Fortaleza and Lisbon – to then connect with Madrid – is “a modern connection” with a very high capacity of “no less than 72 terabytes per second”.

According to Rajoy, the new connection between Latin America and Europe “will reduce the time to transmit data between the two continents by 40% and will also help us to improve quality, reliability and confidentiality.”

Confidentiality was previously touted as a key reason for the cable, with communications between Brazil and the EU currently routed through North America, despite the fact that the Iberian Peninsula is roughly 60 kilometers (37mi) closer to Fortaleza than to Miami.

The question of United States’ dominance in matters of Atlantic Ocean submarine cable affairs came to the fore in 2013, after a series of damaging revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, brought to light the extent of the agency’s surveillance operations.

Rousseff, who in 2013 postponed a state visit to Washington after it was revealed the NSA spied on her email account and phone records, said in 2014 when announcing the cable: “We have to respect privacy, human rights and the sovereignty of nations. We don’t want businesses to be spied upon.”

She continued: “The internet is one of the best things man has ever invented. So we agreed for the need to guarantee … the neutrality of the network, a democratic area where we can protect freedom of expression.”

Hong Kong Telecom plans to construct a fiber optic link connecting Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate (TKOIE) and Chai Wan.

Dubbed, ‘Ultra Express Link’ the 3km submarine cable is expected to be completed in 2017. Hong Kong Telecom says it will foster the development of TKOIE to become Asia’s data center hub.

HKT Group Managing Director, Alex Arena, said: "The building of Ultra Express Link demonstrates once again not only our leading position in solid fiber infrastructure in Hong Kong, but also our dedication to build Hong Kong into a regional data center hub.

“The new cable, together with the existing extensive fiber infrastructure provided by HKT, will allow us to meet the rising demand for high speed and high capacity connectivity requirement from data center operators.”

Arena claimed that HKT was the only operator to provide full diversity with different options of cable route across Hong Kong. “We have full fiber coverage in all data centers in Hong Kong, particularly with diversity paths in all data centers in TKOIE,” he said.

Telcotech, which is building the Malaysia-Cambodia-Thailand (MCT) submarine cable announced in June 2013, says the able is now expected to be operational by the first quarter of 2017. Meanwhile Singapore-based Super Sea Cable Networks (SEAX), which is building a cable to connect the Eastern seaboard of Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, has announced plans to expand it in two phases to Guam.

The MCT cable system will be Cambodia’s first subsea cable. It will run for 1,300 kilometers and will, according to Telcotech, “position Cambodia as the gateway to Asia [and] enable Cambodia to harvest the Asia traffic and extend the connectivity to ASEAN and the rest of the world via Malaysia.”

The cable will land at Sihanoukville, Cambodia, Rayong, Thailand, and Kuantan (Cherating), Malaysia. Telcotech says the landing stations in all three countries are complete and ready to receive the cable.

MCT will use 100Gbps technology and will support a capacity of at least 30Tbps. It will connect to other submarine cable systems, including the Asia-America Gateway that connects South East Asia to the United States.

Huawei Marine was named in September as the builder of the 250km SeaX-1 cable. The cable’s builder, SEAX, has now announced a second phase that will connect Singapore to the US through Guam.  A third phase will connect Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia and will potentially act as an alternative path from these countries using Singapore as a transit hub to the rest of the world, SEAX says.

The SEAX-2 subsea cable system will be built in collaboration with PT Super Sistem Ultima, a licensed submarine cable operator in Indonesia, for the Indonesian landings. The 6,300 km system will have eight fiber pairs and seven branching units at  Kuching (East Malaysia), Jakarta, Surabaya, Bali, Makassar, Balikpapan, Davao. It will have a planned capacity of 100 wavelengths  each carrying 100Gbps.

In Guam it will interconnect with another subsea cable system to connect to the US west coast and will terminate at the One Wilshire data center.

China Telecom Americas recently announced that the second upgrade of Trans Pacific Express (TPE) cable network has passed Provisional Network Acceptance (PNA) and is now ready for service. All parties engaged in the upgrade can put their relative capacity into commercial service.

The TPE cable is a submarine cable system which officially started its commercial service in 2008 with multiple landing stations located across Mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and the United States. Designed to directly link both sides of the Pacific, the TPE has been widely recognized by global enterprises as the first choice for a low latency transmission route between China and the USA.

Beginning in 2014, the second upgrade in the TPE cable’s lifecycle introduced 100 Gb/s DWDM technology, which significantly increased the capacity to 9.6 Tb/s in the trans-Pacific segment and to 17.2 Tb/s in the Intra-Asia segment. China Telecom assets include 10×100 Gb/s bandwidth across the trans-Pacific segment and 4×100 Gb/s bandwidth in intra-Asia segment according to the configuration of the latest upgrade.

With the added capacity of China-US bandwidth brought by the completion of the upgrade, the TPE cable network will effectively meet the rapidly surging demand for low latency Trans-Pacific network solutions for years to come, as well as satisfy demands across Intra-Asia and the China-Japan-US networks.

The following is a detailed distribution of China Telecom’s capacity:

Trans-Pacific Routes- No. of 100G Waves

• T1-T5 Qingdao-US 4
• T2-T5 Korea-US 1
• T3-T5 Taiwan-US 1
• T4-T5 Chongming-US 4

Intra-Asia Routes No. of 100G Waves

• T1-T2 Qingdao- Korea 1
• T3-T4 Chongming – Taiwan 1
• T1-T6 Qingdao -Japan 1
• T4-T6 Chongming -Japan 1

Google’s latest investment in long-haul undersea fibre optic cabling has gone online. The FASTER Cable System gives Google access to up to 10Tbps (Terabits per second) of the cable’s total 60Tbps bandwidth between the U.S. and Japan. They will use this capacity to support their users, including Google Apps and Cloud Platform customers. This is the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built — about ten million times faster than your average cable modem.

"From the very beginning of the project, we repeatedly said to each other, 'faster, Faster and FASTER', and at one point it became the project name, and today it becomes a reality," said Hiromitsu Todokoro, chairman of the FASTER management committee.

The project was first announced back in 2014, and was led by a collaboration of six companies - Google, Global Transit, China Telecom Global, Singtel, China Mobile International, and KDDI. Japanese IT giant NEC Corporation was laid the cable.

This is especially exciting for Google as they prepare to launch a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo later this year. Dedicated bandwidth to this region results in faster data transfers and reduced latency as GCP customers deliver their applications and information to customers around the globe.

The FASTER Cable System is just one example of Google’s ongoing investments in internet infrastructure.  They were the first technology company to invest in undersea cable back in 2008, with the 7.68Tb trans-Pacific Unity cable, which came online in 2010. This completion brings the global number of Google-owned undersea cables up to four, with more (under) the horizon. Google is also backing a project to build a cable called Monet between Florida and Brazil due to be finished by the end of the year.

Google is one of six members of the FASTER Consortium, with sole access to a pair of 100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths optical transmission strands between Oregon and Japan — one strand for sending and one for receiving.

In addition to greater bandwidth, the FASTER Cable System also brings valuable redundancy to the seismically sensitive East Asia region. The cable utilizes Japanese landing facilities strategically located outside of tsunami zones to help prevent network outages when the region is facing the greatest need.

NEC is the supplier that built the $300 million "Faster Cable System" for Google, China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and Singtel. It won't be the highest-capacity cable for very long, as Microsoft and Facebook recently announced a 160Tbps undersea cable from the US to Europe, to be completed in October 2017.

The NEC-built Faster cable, 9,000km long, lands in Oregon and has two landing points in Japan. There are also "extended connections" to major US West Coast hubs to cover Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle, NEC said. Faster is stylized as "FASTER," but it's not an acronym. As you might expect, it was named "Faster" because the companies building it wanted a faster cable.

"Faster is the first trans-Pacific submarine cable system designed from day one to support digital coherent transmission technology, using optimized fibers throughout the submarine portion," NEC said. "The combination of extremely low-loss fiber, without a dispersion compensation section, and the latest digital signal processor, which compensates for the huge amount of cumulative dispersion at the end of the cable, enable this six-fiber pair cable to deliver 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific."

"The cable system ... will help spur innovation on both sides of the Pacific to simulate the growth of the digital economy," said Ooi Seng Keat, vice president of Singtel.

Telefónica will deploy BRUSA, a new submarine cable nearly 11,000 km in length linking Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza (Brazil) with San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Virginia Beach (USA). The cable is expected to begin operations in early 2018 reinforcing Telefónica’s infrastructure leadership in the Americas.

BRUSA will increase route diversity on U.S.-South America routes with an entirely new landing point on the U.S. mainland. At present, no other cables land at Virginia Beach. Other existing and planned U.S.-Brazil cable systems either land or plan to land in Florida or the New York-New Jersey area. BRUSA will therefore offer a new diverse path on the U.S.-Brazil route. This diverse path helps to minimize the risk that a single event, such as a hurricane or anchor or fishing-net entanglement, will disrupt all U.S.-Brazil communications.

BRUSA will offer significant new capacity on a route where capacity demand is increasing substantially each year and where existing systems are nearing the ends of their useful lives. SAm-1, South American Crossing/Latin American Nautilus, and GlobeNeteach entered into commercial service in 2001, while Americas-II entered into commercial service in 2000.

This new system will consist of eight fibre pairs. BRUSA will provide critical new and replacement capacity on the U.S.-Brazil route. It will offer capacity in large increments until the year 2042, far beyond the useful life of most existing systems serving the U.S.-Brazil route.

BRUSA will have a total length of 11,200 kilometres, with a trunk between Virginia Beach, and Rio de Janeiro. It will have two spurs connecting to the trunk via branching units; one spur will connect to San Juan, while the other will connect to Fortaleza. BRUSA will consist of eight optical fibre pairs, with an initial capacity of 1 Tbps and a total design capacity of 108 Tbps. Four “express route” fibre pairs will connect Virginia Beach directly with Rio de Janeiro. Two fibre pairs will connect Virginia Beach, San Juan and Rio de Janeiro, and two fibre pairs will connect Virginia Beach, Fortaleza and Rio de Janeiro.

The BRUSA cable system will enhance competition by competing vigorously with other submarine cable systems on all of the international routes it will serve. Specifically, the BRUSA cable system will compete directly with the existing Americas-II, AMX-1, GlobeNet, and South American Crossing/Latin American Nautilus systems, which—on the U.S. end—land either in Florida, Puerto Rico, or the U.S. Virgin Islands. It will also compete directly with the planned Seabras-1 and Monet systems, which will land in New Jersey and Florida, respectively.

This new infrastructure will improve communication reliability and deliver enhanced resilience by increasing the number of USA landing points, overall network performance and end-to-end security. BRUSA will also provide one of the lowest latency communication links between the two largest economies in the region, Brazil and USA, and will offer a greater flexibility and scalability than previously deployed systems.

Construction

Telefónica and Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (ASN) have signed a turnkey agreement to deploy a nearly 11,000 km submarine cable system linking Brazil to the United States. Named BRUSA, the system will increase end-to-end connectivity and the availability of ultra high-speed broadband services in the region. BRUSA will support ultrafast transmission allowing Telefónica to strengthen its offer in the wholesale market and addressing the exponential growth of data transmission generated by its business-to-business customers, telecom operators, webscale operators and end-users. Linking Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza (Brazil) with San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Virginia Beach (USA), the system will also deliver enhanced resiliency over the Brazil-to-US route.

Philippe Piron, President of Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks, said: “BRUSA comes at a moment of continued interest in the Brazil-US route to reliably carry increasing volumes of data traffic as global demand for ultra-broadband access rises. We are pleased to support Telefónica in seizing the growth opportunities of the global wholesale market and meeting its customers’ demands by making available our latest technology advancements in subsea wet design as an integral part of BRUSA.”

BRUSA will deploy Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks’ technology, which provides full scalability that covers large system deployments and web-scale connectivity. Thanks to stepless optical transmission tuning capabilities offered by ASN’s technology, operators can extract maximum capacity from the wet plant and dry plant and create economies of scale by offering fast and dynamic provisioning.

Other Americas Infrastructure

Telefónica has recently strengthened its infrastructure in the Americas with the deployment of the Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS), a consortium submarine cable with a transmission capacity of up to 80 Tbps, which links Jacksonville (Florida, USA) with the British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Aruba, Curacao, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador. In addition, Telefónica also manages the Unisur cable connecting Uruguay and Argentina and the SAM-1, a submarine cable system deployed in 2000, which forms a 25,000 km ring linking the USA, the Caribbean and Central and South America.

This new submarine cable reinforces Telefónica’s ambition to provide a more cost effective and reliable service to Telefónica companies as well as other telecom operators and content providers, allowing Telefonica to seize the growth opportunities of the global wholesale market.

José María Álvarez-Pallete, Executive Chairman of Telefónica explained that “the company has deeply changed since its origins, keeping the spirit of permanent change and the ambition to be relevant in our DNA: relevant in the digital ecosystem, in all our markets, and especially relevant to people.”

He also reminded us that the aim of the company is to become an Onlife Telco, a telco for and by the people. In this sense, Telefónica has the largest home fibre network available in Spain with more than 14.3 million connected real estate units, and is the European country with the largest number of clients connected with this technology. As for the penetration of LTE, this is 75% in Europe and 43% in Latin America.

He also highlighted that at this time of technological disruption where connectivity is the corner stone, Telefónica is building its future with the support of four major, distinctive technological platforms. Thus, the first of these platforms is made up of the company’s physical assets such as stores, data centers, etc., and the second of networks, operations and differential commercial systems “with unrivalled storage and processing capabilities”, explained Álvarez-Pallete. The third platform consists in the best products and services platforms, while the fourth platform that Telefónica is building is that of client knowledge, tightly linked to Big Data, and that will help the client to recover sovereignty over his/her digital life.

Telxius

BRUSA will become part of Telxius, the global company recently created by Telefónica to best optimize its infrastructure asset portfolio and that will gradually integrate certain of these assets including part of its tower and submarine fiber optic cable networks.

Telecom Review recently reported on this infrastructure overhaul when Telefónica announced the creation of Telxius, a new global company which brings together certain infrastructure assets of the Group.

Telxius will enable the management of the Telefónica Group’s infrastructure on a global scale with a more specialized and focused approach, with the aim of increasing the services provided to other operators, improving the return on capital invested and allowing Telxius to participate more actively in the growth opportunities that exist in the industry, including the possibility of incorporating third party assets.

The infrastructure assets which will initially be brought together in Telxius will include approximately 15,000 Telefónica telecommunication towers in Spain and other countries, as well as the Telefónica Group´s international network of 31,000km of submarine fibre optic cable, including SAM-1, a submarine cable that connects the United States with Central and South America.