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...

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...