Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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 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 landin...

The planned Bulikala cable connects Google's modular prefabricated Guam CLS to Fiji. The branch is right below Guam on the map at the bottom of this page. It is part of a large scale Google project costing a billion dollars  to dramatically increase Pacific subsea throughput and resiliency via a web of island hopping fibre optic cables. These small islands such as Fiji, Christmas Island, the Marshalls, and Polynesia offer diverse network routing that is particularly valuable in case of a subsea cable segment goes dark. They also offer power, which is the gating factor for throughput over long distances. All power conductors lead to voltage drawdown which limits bandwidth. Boosting power at intermediate points will allow higher transmission rates and lead to better return on the capital invested. The overall plan is to connect Japan, Guam, Hawaii, many islands such as Fiji and French Polynesia to the US in such a way as to increase both throughput via power stops at small islands a...