wiredInUSA December 2017

Cable consortium

Cape Town gets POP

image: www.capetown.travel

NTT Corporation, SoftBank, Facebook, Amazon, PLDT and PCCW Global have signed an agreement to participate in the construction and maintenance of the Jupiter large-capacity low-latency optical submarine cable between Asia and the United States. The Jupiter cable system will have a total length of 14,000km, connecting Japan, the US and the Philippines. There will be two landing points in Japan, a US landing station in California and a landing at Daet in the Philippines. NTT Com’s Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE), Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) and PacificCrossing-1 (PC-1) cableswill connect with Jupiter to provide a redundant three- route structure linking major cities in Asia, Japan and the US. Jupiter will feature a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer, employing WSS (wavelength selective switch) for a gridless and flexible bandwidth configuration. The cable is expected to launch in early 2020 with an initial design capacity of 60TBps, which will be expanded later to meet rising data demands and complement existing cable systems. Communications

Angola Cables has announced plans for a point of presence in Cape Town, its second in the South Africa after Johannesburg, as the company prepares to serve the market with the new South Atlantic Cable System (SACS). The Cape Town POP will be opened by the end of 2017. “Increasing demand has resulted in Angola Cables’ decision to develop a POP infrastructure for customers based, or with operations, in Cape Town,” it said in a statement. The announcement of the Cape Town POP follows the news that the SACS project is nearing completion. SACS will be the first submarine system to connect the west coast of Africa with Brazil. The company will soon begin laying the deep-water section. The fiber optic cable will be supplied by Japan’s NEC, with France’s Orange Marine contracted to lay it on the ocean bed. It is expected to be fully operational before mid-2018. The deep-water phase will take 90 days to install 6,200km of cable at depths of up to 5km. The cable system will provide a more direct route to the US for South African Internet users. Internet traffic to the US is currently routed via Europe and then across the north Atlantic.

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wiredInUSA - December 2017