Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

This was initially diagnosed as a shunt fault, but the cable appears to be effectively severed with the approximate location of 9 kilometers from repeater 4 towards repeater 3. To the best of my knowledge this is 2Africa's first wet segment outage on the West African coast. No repair date is available at this time.

Abidjan clients on WACS report an outage began 4 AM local time today. Outage began with a severe drop of 385 volts. Investigation shows the fault lies in segment S3C between the first and second repeater on the Ivory Coast branching unit. So the outage should only affect Cote d'Ivoire. A ship has been dispatched to fix it. Two years ago four cables were severed off Abidjan due to a debris slide in the subterranean cavern known as Le Trou Sans Fond. Also a 2Africa outage started 1:30 PM Abidjan time. More information will be provided as it becomes available. First map below is 2Africa. Second is WACS. 

Reliable sources indicate that Google's 16 fiber pair Nuvem (Portuguese for 'cloud') cable has landed. There is typically a lag of a year between landings and RFS. So expect the system to be fully activated next Spring. I assume, without any insider knowledge, that either EXA or Telxius will acquire spectrum or a fiber pair on Nuvem. The cable's design capacity is 384 Tbps. Nuvem lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, also home to Anjana and Firmina. For Google, which owns the South Atlantic Firmina cable, this solves a big problem. It can move traffic between South America and Europe via the Myrtle Beach CLS. It also diversifies the routing of Google's Atlantic traffic and reduces latency for both the Southern US and Southern Europe. Interestingly enough, Google used a subsidiary as the landing partner at Myrtle Beach, and at Sines, Portugal. The hyperscalers are becoming increasingly vertically integrated. In the past it was customary to outsource landings and cab...

Mombasa Icolo 1/Djibouti CLS; $23,500 MRC; 3 Years. Protected backhaul to Djibiouti data center only $1,050 extra. 🙂  Mombasa Icolo 2/JB Terraco; $25,400 MRC; 3 Years. Backhaul protected.

The National Institute of IT and Communication Technology (NICT) in Japan has been diligently working for many years on dramatically increasing fibre optic bandwidth by using a wider spectrum range than the traditional C and L bands. The long haul fibre optic networks have relied exclusively on the C and L bands because they offer the lowest optical attenuation for silicon-based fibre optics. Light in these frequency bands fades and loses strength relatively slowly as it passes through fibre optic glass. But as the chart below shows, the C and L bands comprise just a fraction of the available spectrum that lasers can use.  In this trial the NICT achieved 450 Tbps on a repeatered London metro fibre pair connecting Telehouse London to the University of London. Because existing optical amplifiers are designed to work only in the C and L bands, NICT has spent years developing amplifiers optimized for the O, E, S, and U bands. These bands required that the fibre optic strands in the am...

RTD: 135 milliseconds. Term: 1 Year. Only one wave available.