Google Cable Update: Tabua Lands On Australia's Sunshine Coast

Tabua is part of Google's grand Pacific Initiative, a project to build a mesh-like web of subsea cables connecting Japan, the US, Australia, and many Pacific islands. The islands include Guam, Fiji, Hawaii, and French Polynesia. These islands play a crucial role: they provide power to keep throughput at higher levels than otherwise possible. Another key role for the islands is as telecom switching hubs with each cable landing station serving several high capacity cables. 

Tabua is a standard 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable with two branches landing on the Australian and American sides. Design throughput is 17 Tbps per fibre pair. This dual branch approach has become popular because in this case if the Queensland branch is damaged, traffic can be switched to the New Wales CLS with fibre linking the two cable landing stations. Similarly, on the US side, it lands in Hawaii and also Los Angeles. If the Hawaii/LA segment fails, then the traffic can be routed via other cables landing in Hawaii to the US. This double branch approach has become popular because most outages occur on the continental shelf where ships prowl and not in the deep sea. It also reduces the average latency by allowing traffic to take the shorter path for its particular destination. Brisbane is in Queensland whereas Sydney is in New Wales. So traffic latency can be optimized. 

To its credit Google is not skimping on these projects. Each Australian landing has its own new cable landing station. The same holds true for Tabua landing in Fiji's main island, Viti Levu. It uses a branching unit to land on both the West and East sides of the island, each served by a new CLS, and the two cable landing stations are connected by fibre. So if a branch fails, Tabua can reroute traffic via the other branch. So the branching unit has not only standard wavelength switching, but also fibre pair switching as well. Every Tabua branch has 16 pairs in order to enable all traffic to be migrated in case of network problems. The modular data center provider DXN is supplying some of the prefabricated cable landing stations. 

What Google is doing in the Pacific is similar to what it is doing in the Atlantic Ocean with the SOL and Nuvem cables. Both SOL and Nuvem land in Bermuda and the Azores islands and use each other for backup. It is a clever design. 

Map of the Fibre Optic Tabua Subsea Cable

Map of the Fibre Optic Tabua Subsea Cable


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