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 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...