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

On 13th July, Equinix announced the launch of a new international fibre optic cable project under the Manche. The network, called CrossChannel Fibre, will connect Equinix's London and Paris centres via landing stations in Brighton and Veules-les-Roses. It will be operational from the end of 2021.

"The 520-kilometre cable has 96 fibre pairs, will offer more than 20 Tbits per fibre pair, and will have the lowest latency of any network connecting London and Paris," boasts Equinix management, who also note that this is the first submarine fibre optic cable laying project in the English Channel for nearly 20 years.

This new project allows Equinix to continue to expand its network in France. To this end, the company recently signed a major partnership with Terralpha, the SNCF Réseau subsidiary responsible for developing the carrier's very high-speed network in France. The agreement will allow all companies hosted in Equinix data centres to use the 20,000 km of fibre optic cable running along the SNCF Réseau rail network.

The data centre operator expects to increase its turnover by 10 to 11% in 2021, thanks to the expansion of its data centre network and its cloud services.

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Source : ZDNet

According to Reuters, the European Commission has just opened an investigation into cable imports from China to the Old Continent. The aim is to check the business practices of Chinese manufacturers, which their European counterparts accuse of selling at too low a price.

Following a complaint filed on 10th August by Europacable, the European cable manufacturers' lobby, an anti-dumping investigation has been launched. If the European Commission agrees with the complainants, it could lead to the imposition of customs barriers within 15 months.

Europacable believes that the conditions for marketing in Europe single-mode fibre made in China are unfair because of the artificially low tariffs applied. In its complaint, the cable manufacturers' organisation also asked to see this trend increase against the backdrop of the imposition of customs barriers on these Chinese products in the United States. This would risk redirecting to Europe the volumes not sold across the Atlantic.

An initiative echoing the alarm signal sounded a year ago by the union of French manufacturers in the sector. Quarter after quarter, Sycabel highlights the sharp drop in fibre optic orders for the French telecoms sector and the concomitant rise in Asian imports.

In its last quarterly report, the organisation recalled the difficulties that this situation was causing for a "French sector of excellence", while "massive investments have been made to support the deployment of the France THD plan".

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Source : DegroupTest

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

Fibre optic cables, data transfer and storage stations and power plants form a vast network of physical infrastructure that underpins Internet connections.

Recent research shows that a large part of this infrastructure will be affected by rising water levels in the coming years. After mapping the Internet infrastructure in the United States, scientists overlayed it with maps showing sea level rise. Their results: in 15 years, thousands of kilometres of fibre optic cables and hundreds of other critical infrastructures are at risk of being overwhelmed by the waves. Still according to the researchers, the extra few centimetres of water could plunge nearly 20% of the U.S. Internet infrastructure underwater.

"Much of the existing infrastructure is located just off the coast, so it doesn't take much more than a few centimetres of water to get it underwater", says Paul Barford, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-author of the study: The network was deployed 20 years ago, when no one thought that sea levels could rise.

The physical structure of the Internet network has been installed somewhat randomly and often opportunistically along power lines, roads or other major infrastructure in recent decades when demand has exploded.

While scientists, designers and companies have long been aware of the risks posed by rising water levels on roads, subways and power lines, no one has so far been interested in the consequences that this could have on the physical Internet network.

"When you consider how interconnected everything is today, protecting the Internet is crucial", says Mikhail Chester, director of the Resilient Infrastructure Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Even the smallest technical incidents can have disastrous consequences. He continues "this new study reinforces the idea that we must be aware of the state of these systems, because it will take a long time to update them".

Rich Sorkin, co-founder of Jupiter Intelligence, a company that models climate-induced risks, says, "We live in a world designed for an environment that no longer exists". And concludes by saying that "accepting the reality of our future is essential - and this type of study only underlines the speed with which we will have to adapt".

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Source : National Geographic