The TGN Pacific Cable - A Hidden Gem

In the late 90s Tyco Electronics (TE) purchased AT&T's subsea cable laying division. Stock prices of new fibre optic networks were soaring and priced at multiples similar to American Tech Giants today. So TE built a global subsea network, Tyco Global Network (TGN), to sell wholesale capacity. By the time it was completed in 2003, bandwidth pricing had collapsed. It was clear that the billions spent on TGN would never be recouped. By 2005, TATA, then known as VSNL, scooped it up for $130 million in one of the great contrarian investments in the telecom industry (Hibernia Atlantic's purchase in 2001 is another example). TATA got a lot. It included two Atlantic cables structured as a ring, dual cables linking India to Marseille and to Singapore plus a number of Pacific cables. TGN Pacific was one of those distressed assets.

TGN Pacific was designed like most cables of that era to be self healing. Today most customers provide their own route protection via routers or switches. In those days the optical backbones were 10G waves, but the actual services offered were usually protected SDH or SONET. If one cable went dark, then any unprotected services would be manually migrated to the other path.

TGN Pacific's South and North cables land at Hillsboro, Oregon, and are served by the same CLS. There is an undersea fibre loop from the CLS down to LA as depicted in the map. A bore pipe is used to bring the cables ashore because they protect the cable better than simple burial. On the Japanese side the North and South cables come ashore at Emi and Toyohashi and are served by their own cable landing stations. This is a big deal because Japanese cable landing stations generally serve many cable systems. The Maruyama CLS is home to 8 cable networks. So TGN Pacific offers unique cable landing diversity and has its own proprietary fibre back to Tokyo. Indeed, there is fibre directly connecting the Emi and Toyohashi sites. It is a complete ring.

In contrast, most Pacific cables land either in Washington or near LA. Moreover, most do not have bore pipes housing their cables as they come ashore. So TGN Pacific is a worthy addition to your network portfolio simply on the grounds of its superior design and physical diversity. The high construction standard is reflected in TGN Pacific experiencing far fewer faults than competitors like PC-1. Although I cannot reveal exact details of its outage history due to an NDA with TATA, I can say that if you have a single link between Tokyo and the US, TGN Pacific should be your choice just based on uptime. If you have many routes connecting the two countries, then the cable is a physical diversity complement and will reduce the your network portfolio's overall risk. On top of that, latency is low. A wave from Tokyo to NYC on this system is well below 170 ms RTD. Although the cable system is not high capacity by today's standards, it has about 8 Tbps per cable or 16 Tbps in total.