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

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