Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Quintillion was really formed to build a subsea cable from Japan to Europe via the North Pole. It acquired the assets, mostly human capital and preliminary research, of Arctic Fiber in 2016, and as a first step deployed a North Alaskan subsea cable serving coastal communities plus some terrestrial fibre. See the map below on the left.  No expense was spared protecting it from the harsh environment. Quintillion was buried 3.5 to 4.5 meters deep, probably a record, and for landings a bore pipe was deployed. Nonetheless, it was an ultra-high risk project. Icebergs gouge the sea floor as they float. It is called ice scouring. They carve trenches as deep as 15 meters into the sea floor. The fact is that there is no viable protection against them. Moreover, there were no icebreaker cable ships to fix the cable in case of outages. This meant that outages during autumn, winter or spring could not be fixed until late summer. As an example, Quintillion's most recent outage began in January 2...

The three fibre pair Quintillion cable went live in 2017. Its current throughput is 10 Tbps per fibre pair. It includes terrestrial back haul from Prudhoe Bay down to Fairbank, Alaska, in the middle of the state. The cable was deeply buried with an average depth of 3.7 meters with bore pipes used to bring the fibre pair ashore to the manhole. Each landing threads the fibre optic cable through steel conduit at least 18 meters under the sea floor up to 1.6 kilometers offshore. This was accomplished via horizontal directional drilling. Project cost was around $150 million. The cable is a godsend for these Alaskan communities and was built to top notch engineering standards. But it still suffers from ice scouring incidents where icebergs cut through the sea floor and have severed or severely damaged the cable. A major outage occurs roughly once a year, but the real problem is the repair time. It is simply not economical for a subsea cable to own an icebreaker or to risk a cable ship's ...