One of the main transatlantic cable projects concerning France has just "landed" on a beach at Porge, near Bordeaux. The project was initiated by Facebook and built by Alcatel Submarine Networks. Orange, partner for the French part, was responsible for the operation. This required horizontal drilling 20 metres below the beach and the dune, in order to limit the impact on the environment and in particular the forest.

Named "Amitié", this cable links Massachusetts in the United States to Porge in France and Bude in England. It is 6,800 km long and carries a total of 16 pairs of optical fibres. It is scheduled to come into service in early 2022.

The French incumbent will benefit from two fibre pairs on this cable and will be responsible for the operation and maintenance of the "landing station". Orange will provide the terrestrial links from this station to Bordeaux, then Paris and Lyon, and finally the rest of Europe. It also states that the cable will enable new data centres to be set up in the Bordeaux area.

Another transatlantic cable, "Dunant", was recently commissioned in the Vendée by Google. With traffic between Europe and North America doubling on average every two years, investment in new infrastructure is needed to absorb the increase. Between them, "Dunant" and "Amitié" will have more capacity than any previous transatlantic cable.

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Source : L'Usine Digitale

Called "Pacific Light Cable Network" (PLCN), the underwater fiber optic cable that was supposed to link Los Angeles to Hong Kong will finally not be built. This is indeed what Facebook and Google have just announced. The new plans for this cable filed with the U.S. telecom police, the FCC, indicate that it will connect only the United States to Taiwan and the Philippines.

This project, initially announced in 2016, was intended to connect Hong Kong directly to Los Angeles via six pairs of optical fibers. It had to be redesigned in a hurry to get approval from the US regulator, whose management is said to be close to the Trump administration.

Three companies share ownership of the consortium: Google owns one pair of fibers with a branch to Taiwan, Facebook owns another pair with branches to the Philippines, and the Hong Kong Pacific Light Data Co (PLDC) has control over all the remaining pairs and acts as the landing point in Hong Kong.

And it is this last part that poses a problem for the FCC. The FCC has therefore refused to operate this submarine cable system connecting directly to Hong Kong, arguing that it would be contrary to U.S. national security interests.

The U.S. Telecom Constabulary also argued that the high capacity and low latency of the network would encourage U.S. communications traffic crossing the Pacific to detour through Hong Kong before reaching its intended destination, unnecessarily increasing the amount of data passing through the Chinese government-controlled infrastructure. This has forced Google and Facebook to revise their plans.

"We can confirm that the original application for the PLCN cable system has been withdrawn, and a revised application has been submitted.... We continue to work through established channels to obtain landing licenses for our submarine cables," said Google management, interviewed by ZDNet editors.

The initial project had the potential to attract many U.S. companies to expand their customer base in Asia. The current tensions between Beijing and Washington are claiming other victims...

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Source : ZDNet

The social network has just announced that it has developed a robot capable of winding optical fiber on medium-voltage power lines, in partnership with ULC Robotics. The cost would thus be three to five times lower than the traditional aerial construction operated by the players in the sector.

Karthik Yogeeswaran, wireless systems engineer at Facebook Connectivity, believes that the complexity of fiber deployment is hindering the global adoption of ultra high-speed broadband. So this innovation could make a big difference in a large part of the developing world, but also in countries with very large territories.

"The idea of using electricity infrastructure first came to us after seeing the ubiquitous power grid infrastructure as we travelled through rural Africa. ...with its long transmission lines usually suspended from high lattice towers, power transmission networks perform a function similar to that of an internet backbone, connecting generation sites to substations."

Facebook's innovation is expected to prove decisive as it will reduce the manual deployment of optical fibre on medium-voltage lines. The robot is capable of continuing the deployment on live lines while overcoming the obstacles it encounters in order to minimize disruptions to electrical services.

However, the robot must be light enough to be supported by these medium voltage lines. The amount of optical fiber that it can carry with it is therefore limited. To get around this difficulty, Facebook has modified the size of the cable used.

"While traditional aerial fiber deployment involves heavy machinery, coil carts, large coils and large teams, a fiber deployment team deploying our solution will consist of two or three power line installers and a van with a few kilometers of fiber coils, a robot and a few accessories, which will allow many teams to work in parallel", says Karthik Yogeeswaran.

In developing countries, Facebook estimates that the total cost of deploying a very high-speed network, including the labour needed to operate the robot, would be between 2 and 3 dollars per metre. The US giant explains that "by reducing the total cost of aerial deployment of the fibre, we hope our system will have a significant impact on Internet penetration, especially in the half of the world that earns less than $5.50 a day",

While this innovation should not be used in France, it should help to improve the adoption of very high speed broadband in many parts of the world.

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Source : ZDNet

On March 30th, the European Union's telecoms regulatory agency (ORECE) said that no major Internet congestion problems had occurred since the start of the Covid-19 health crisis: "Network operators have been able to cope with this additional traffic load". While overall traffic on fixed and mobile networks has increased significantly, there has been no major downtime across Europe due to possible over-consumption of bandwidth, she explained.

The statement comes after worrying predictions by several experts that the Internet infrastructure may not be able to cope with the increase in traffic.

Although some Internet access problems were "observed and mitigated," they were deemed "local and temporary." No unusual incidents were observed by the agency, which also commended the telecom operators in some member countries for implementing specific measures.

In some EU Member States, the ORECE noted "a stabilisation of traffic", but also "a decrease in peak traffic". This decrease is attributed to "traffic reduction measures" put in place by "some of the largest CAPs", a term used to refer to Internet content and service providers.

Indeed, two weeks ago, the agency formally requested video streaming services to reduce the quality of service for European users in order to avoid overloading the EU's Internet architecture. The first to agree were Netflix and YouTube and have started to provide SD streams. Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Facebook responded later and also capped the quality of video streaming for the EU.

Although not approached by the ORECE officials, Akamai, Microsoft and Sony also slowed down game downloads during peak hours to avoid congesting the Internet infrastructure when a new game or update is released and deployed to millions of users.

Some experts, however, have publicly criticised the agency's call, castigating unnecessary panic. Several ISPs said that the Internet backbone had been specially designed for times like these and is therefore designed to handle sudden and very large volumes of traffic.

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Source : ZDNet

France's leading Internet service providers ranked it as one of the largest consumers of bandwidth a year ago. These groups, such as Google, Netflix, Akamai, Facebook, take advantage of the tips of French operators without paying their fair share.

The French Telecoms Federation (FFT) and its president are therefore calling for "more equity". In an interview with Le Figaro, Arthur Dreyfuss explains that "80% of the taxes paid in France by digital players are paid by French telecom operators. At certain times of the day, 80% of telecom network traffic is due to YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook".

Under these conditions, the FFT proposes to introduce a toll, i.e. to charge for access to the networks of French operators. As these pipes are extremely profitable for American giants, access providers are wondering when they will participate in financing the infrastructure. Indeed, ISPs must constantly invest in expanding and improving their networks. These are therefore heavy financing for which the Internet giants participate little or not at all.

This proposal does not come about by chance since the government wants to introduce a tax on the advertising activities of the largest digital companies. It should be implemented very quickly since it has just been voted by the Senate.

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Source : Journal du Geek

In the Wall Street Journal the company decided to talk about this disproportionate operation, called "Simba". Very few details have so far been revealed about the project. We only know that it would be connected to existing access points, particularly on some beaches on the east, north and west coasts.

Surrounding Africa with a gigantic submarine fibre optic cable would allow almost the entire population to enjoy the Internet. Facebook knows that to extend, it must absolutely attack this continent inhabited by more than 1.2 billion people and which is not yet very well connected to the rest of the world. This is due to infrastructure that is still under development and completely uncovered areas. So if several million Africans could connect to the Internet tomorrow and create a Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram account, the social network would save a lot of users in a very short time.

However, there would not yet be a signed agreement for the installation of this huge cable. And this is not the first time Facebook has talked about installing an underwater cable to connect the world. Facebook was pulling a transatlantic cable over 6,500 kilometers long, Marea, in 2017 with the help of Microsoft. The installation began in 2016 and provided a stable connection in 2018 by connecting Virginia Beach, United States to Bilbao, Spain.

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Source : Siècle Digital