Puleleiite Tufele Li’a Jr., the chairman of the board of the American Samoa Telecommunications Authority (ASTCA), has revealed that American Samoa will join Samoa’s project to deploy the 1,693km Tui-Samoa cable system, following the inking of a parallel agreement to participate in the Hawaiki system. In an interview with Talanei News Agency, the executive said: ‘American Samoa is going with both the Tui-Samoa cable and the Hawaiki cable … Currently, ASTCA has [just over] 500Mbps of bandwidth: 400Mbps from the O3b [satellite] network and 145Mbps from the American Samoa-Hawaii cable, which has a capacity of 1Gbps, but is shared by Samoa and American Samoa … The Tui-Samoa cable will provide [capacity of] 10Gbps.’ The 8Tbps Tui-Samoa network will connect Samoa to Wallis and Futuna, Vanua Levu (the second largest island of Fiji) and on to Suva on the Fiji mainland by December 2017. Meanwhile, the 13,127km Hawaiki Cable will connect Australia, New Zealand and the US with a number of South Pacific Islands and Hawaii, with a ready for service (RFS) date of June 2018.
Two submarine cable systems – the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) and the Tata TGN-Intra Asia (TGN-IA) – were damaged off Hong Kong’s coast on 28 August, reportedly due to a major storm. According to VietNam News, the 20,000km AAG cable, which links Vietnam to Hong Kong and the US, suffered damage at two sections, around 66km and 85km from the cable landing station in Hong Kong, while the damage to the 6,700km TGN-IA cable linking the Philippines with Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam was located around 54km from Hong Kong.
Elsewhere, Vocus has confirmed that the SeaMeWe-3 subsea cable between Perth and Singapore is experiencing an outage. The 39,000km cable system, which services South East Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe, should be repaired by 13 October, although Vocus said this is a ‘tentative’ date that could change.
Telenor has established two new points of presence (PoP) in North America to meet customer demand in high traffic regions. The new facilities mean that the Telenor PoP network now spans 14 locations across North America, Europe and Asia. The Telenor Global IPX network is an all IP-based network, built upon a carrier-grade routing platform.
Ireland-France Subsea Cable Limited (IFSC) has appointed Fergus Innes as Managing Director effective 1 September 2017. Mr Innes will have responsibility for business development activities on the 565km Ireland-France Cable-1 (IFC-1), a fibre-optic submarine cable system directly linking Ireland and France. The IFC-1 system has been designed to extend terrestrially into Dublin (Ireland) and Paris (France) providing PoP-to-PoP connectivity and enabling long digital line segments. The system is scheduled to be RFS in Q4 2018.
Finally, backbone network operator RETN has performed a network upgrade at the EvoSwitch data centre in the Amsterdam area. The upgrade of RETN’s PoP doubles RETN’s existing network capacity at EvoSwitch AMS1. RETN claims network coverage of 29 countries, across three continents, with a heavy footprint in Eastern Europe and Russia. The network encompasses 32,000km of lit fibre.