RFS 2026 - Carnival Submarine Network

This interesting project will connect Miami, Florida via a West Florida landing to carrier neutral sites in Panama, Columbia, and Ecuador. Telconet, an Ecuador infrastructure operator is the owner. It is highly unusual for a regional South American network operator to build a cable to the US. It takes a lot of money. There is inevitably more FCC, State Department, and NSA scrutiny.  We know relatively little regarding the project. ASN will construct and deploy the 4500 kilometer cable. The technology is spatial division multiplexing implying at least 12 fibre pairs. 

According to a Telconet press release earlier today, all the major subsea and terrestrial segments have been finished. There are three branching units for future expansion: one for Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. It has become customary to deploy branching units to countries even in the absence of commercial landing agreements or partners. My guess is that the Telxius cable landing on Mexico's East Coast dampened immediate interest in Carnival. But it is likely that someone will land the cable in Mexico for the sake of getting a sweet deal on low cost transport. 

Right now Telconet is in the process of selecting the DWM provider, which will probably be Ciena or Infinera. Given the long development cycle of a subsea cable, it has been customary to select the wet technology early on, but delay the DWDM decisions as long as possible in order to capture the latest technology. Development cycles are becoming longer and longer due to the scarity of cable laying ships as well as the more and more exotic routing of newer cables. So selecting terminal electronics upfront for a project that may only be finished in 3 to 6 years risks technological obsolescense. Optical amplifiers mean that the wet segment is technologically agnostic to the dry segment. So the two sets of decision require neither the same vendor or similar timing.