The New E2A Cable: RFS 2028

The East Asia to America cable connects Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the US. It is a standard spatial multiplexing cable with 12 fibre pairs and aggregate design throughput of 192 Tbps. Per fibre pair throughput is relatively limited 16 Tbps due to the cable's long length of 12,500 kilometers together with the lack of any intermediate power sources. E2A is an open cable so the common infrastructure is limited to the wet segment plus the power feed which is typically housed at the cable landing station. Each fibre pair and spectrum owner will install and operate their own submarine termination equipment such as the DWDM kit. Indeed, each owner is free to choose the data centers in which it terminates its capacity. The network design minimizes latency by using a main trunk from Taiwan to Moro, California with branching units to South Korea and Japan. See the map below. 

This cable is interesting because to date there have been no direct South Korea to US links. This is the first. E2A is also notable because it is a member of an endangered species, namely a carrier consortium with not a single OTT! Owners include Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan's PTT), the competitive South Korean carrier, SK Broadand, Softbank, which has a thriving Japanese broadband subsidiary, and finally, Verizon Business. It is well known that Google, Facebook, and Amazon are keeping the vast bulk of their Asian cable capacity for their own traffic. It has been proven difficult, although not possible, to secure capacity for my clients on Topaz, Echo, and Bifrost. So carriers may be forced to build their own cables. Note this carrier consortium project is rather routine. It uses existing cable landing stations and landing spots. So unlike the OTTs which were looking constantly for new physical diversity, E2A is really just about moving packets at the lowest possible costs. The OTTs are the innovators in the subsea cable space. Sooner or later the carriers copy what the OTTs pioneer. Alas, most subsea cable innovation comes from outside the service provider segment of the industry. I find this sort of sad. It reminds me of my days at AT&T when its senior management definitely wanted to provide all the value-added services. Listening to their speeches my silent thought was they didn't stand a chance. They were stodgy, white Republican males with not a new thought in their 30 year careers. 😃