WCA November 2020

Telecom news

TV provider continues to splash the cash The US satellite TV provider DISH Network, in addition to its recent $1.4bn acquisition of Boost Mobile, has confirmed its takeover of the mobile virtual network operator Ting Mobile from the Canadian telecommunication company Tucows. With effect from 1 August 2020, most Ting Mobile customers (estimated at around 272,000) across the USA became customers of DISH, joining Boost subscribers in their access to an enlarged T-Mobile US network. DISH will continue to use the Ting Mobile brand for the time being, while retaining an option to purchase the brand, and Tucows will continue to operate its fibre business under its Ting Internet name. If DISH decides to keep the brand, Tucows will rename as Ting Fiber. Tucows is to reposition itself as a mobile services enabler (MSE), delivering functions including billing, activation, provisioning and funnel marketing to mobile providers. DISH will be the first mobile technology customer for Tucows. Elliot Noss, the president and CEO of Tucows, commented, “Strategically, our move from an MVNO business to the MSE model aligns with our long-standing belief that leveraging Tucows’ core competencies and technology platforms to manage complex business processes is a competitive advantage.” In the meantime, DISH continues to work on an ongoing roll-out of what it believes to be the first 5G, cloud- native open radio access network (O-RAN) in the USA. The cloud computing and software company VMware has been selected to deploy the cloud platform, designed to “combine the efficiency of the distributed telco cloud, public cloud and private cloud environments while delivering consistent, low- latency edge computing.” DISH and VMware are said to have tested and onboarded many cloud- native 5G network functions from multiple software vendors on top of the VMware Telco Cloud.

New subsea cable will celebrate a pioneer

consortium of Telecommunications Management Group (TMG) and WFN Strategies, to provide technical, legal, financial and economic specifications for the construction of an undersea cable between the two continents. A dedicated fund for the project will be established by the end of the year, with bids for the contract scheduled for invitation in 2021. The US FCC has approved a landing at Hermosa Beach, California, for the Southern Cross NEXT subsea cable system. The new landing licence will allow the system to interconnect to Southern Cross’s existing data centre locations in Los Angeles (Equinix LA1 and CoreSite LA1) and Silicon Valley (Equinix SV1, Equinix SV8 and Corsetier SV1). The new cable will provide 72 Tbps of total design capacity between Sydney (Australia), Auckland (New Zealand) and the USA, with additional connections to Fiji, Samoa, Tokelau and Kiribati. Relocated landing plan GCI Communication Corporation (GCICC) has applied to relocate its landing point for Segment 1 of the Alaska United Southeast (AU-SE) submarine cable system to Wrangell (Alaska). The AU-SE system, operating since October 2008, connects the communities of Angoon, Hawk Inlet, Juneau, Ketchikan, Petersburg, Sitka and Wrangell with the existing Alaska United West System (owned by GCICC’s affiliate, Alaska United Fiber System Partnership). Segment 1 of the AU-SE system connects Wrangell with Ketchikan. In Wrangell, Segment 1 shares a landing with Segment 2 of the AU-SE system, connecting Wrangell to Mitkof Island (also known as the Petersburg South landing). The relocation of the Segment 1 landing will demand the construction of a new beach manhole, but will not affect the existing cable landing station. Southern Cross’s Los Angeles landing

Google’s latest subsea cable, planned to run between New York (USA), Bude (UK) and Bilbao (Spain), will be named The Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist who was also a rear admiral in the US Navy, is credited among the first programmers of the Harvard Mark 1 computer. Ms Hopper was the recipient of 40 honorary degrees from universities around the world, and many awards, honours and recognitions, including the Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award (1964); the first American (and first woman of any nationality) to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (1973); and the Defense Distinguished Service Medal on her retirement in 1986. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is an annual conference “designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.” The Grace Hopper cable will be equipped with 16 fibre pairs (32 fibres) to provide “a significant upgrade to the Internet infrastructure currently connecting the US with Europe.” The contract to build the cable was signed with New Jersey-based SubCom earlier this year, and the project is expected to be completed in 2022. The cable will incorporate new optical fibre switching, designed to enable Google to better facilitate traffic in the event of outages. Chilean government reroutes its plans The Chilean government has con- cluded its consultation on the viability of deploying a submarine cable to Asia, and has chosen instead to develop a subsea fibre optic route to Australia. Under the new plan, the 13,000km Asia-South America Digital Gateway will link Chile to Auckland (New Zealand) and Sydney (Australia). Chile’s Transport and Telecommu- nications Ministry (MTT) and the Department of Telecom- munications (Subsecretaria de Telecomunicaciones – Subtel) awarded the feasibility study to a

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Wire & Cable ASIA – November/December 2020

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