Facebook's New Pacific Cable ORCA
Facebook is building a six fibre pair cable directly connecting Taiwan to the the United States with landings at Toucheng, Taiwan, Hermosa Beach, California, and Manchester, California. RFS is 2Q2027. The Hermosa Beach CLS is the well known facility built by RTI Holdings before its bankruptcy. In the submarine cable landing license application, Facebook noted that its motivation was the fact that US-Taiwanese traffic is growing rapidly each year. Due to the 12,000 kilometer length of the cable and the absence of any island landings for power, the design throughput per pair is a relatively low 12.8 Tbps or 76.8 Tbps aggregate initial capacity. ORCA is an open cable so each fibre pair owner will operate and control its own submarine line terminating equipment with only power being under collective control. Since Facebook is the cable's sole initial owner, the open architecture suggests it will sell capacity on the system to third parties to recoup capital expenditures and share comm...
