Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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....

Juno is the Queen of the Olympian gods in Roman Mythology. This 20 fibre pair cable has design capacity of 320 Tbps, which makes it the highest capacity subsea network to connect the US to Asia. It lands at Grover Beach, California, and also has Japanese landings at Shima and Minami-Boso. NTT is the project's main backer and owner. The carrier clearly felt that two Japanese branches along with three cable landing stations (Softbank Maruyama, NTT Shima, and NTT Minami-Boso) would significantly improve resiliency given Japan's reputation for earthquakes and other natural disasters such as tsunamis. As is usual for a NTT project, it created a standalone company known as SerenJuno in which it has majority ownership to minimize risk. This way any misfortunes would not result in the parent company having financial liabilities. NTT is also extremely reserved about revealing capacity owners on the system. I have learned that PCCW is on the system. Details Ownership: NTT and Mitsui. Cap...