Subsea Roundup: Seaborn, IFSC, Quintillion, Ciena, Infinera

Here’s a quick update on some subsea cable news from this week:

Seaborn Networks has a new partner to help flesh out the ecosystem for its new Seabras-1 cable system connecting New York City and Sao Paolo, Brazil. They’ll have Megaport’s elastic interconnection software platform on tap via a new partnership. Interestingly, Seaborn will also have exclusive rights to deploy Megaport solutions both two and inside South America. That gets Megaport a foothold on yet another new continent without further stretching those expansion dollars.

Europe will apparently be getting another cable system.  Ireland-France Subsea Cable Limited is teaming up with Tiger Infrastructure Partners to build a new cable between, you guessed it, Ireland and France.  With Brexit still happening, it’s not at all surprising that such a system bypassing London might be on the menu, and with more transatlantic bandwidth landing on Ireland lately (e.g. via Aqua Comms’ AEConnect), there’s certainly more opportunity for demand.  The system is scheduled to be operational sometime in late 2018.

Alaska-based Quintillion Networks has selected the gear that will power its new submarine cable system through the Arctic Ocean. They have picked Ciena’s 8700 Packetwave platform and a variety of software and other technology to do the heavy lifting on the first phase of the project, due to be in service later this year. That’s the part connecting Nome in western Alaska with Prudhoe Bay in the north, with branches into Barrow, Point Hope, Wainwright, and Kotzebue. The hard part will surely be the next phase, laying fiber along the northern Canadian Arctic coastline.

And Infinera kicked off this week with a product launch aimed at the subsea side of things. They introduced two meshponders, a new 1.2Tbps line card, and new software tools, augmenting the DTN-X family and making it capable of 12Tbps among other things. The new gear will start to be available in the second quarter of this year.

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Categories: Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables