Undersea Roundup 1/17: Southern Cross, Hibernia, GlobeNet, GBI

Lots of submarine cable news lately, timed in part no doubt with the PTC meeting this week. Here’s a quick look at some more interesting items:

Southern Cross provided an update on its current status, announcing the availability of the first 200Gbps from its latest upgrade (to 40G), plus a price cut of up to 44%. Additionally, they say they will have 100G deployed by December of 2012, keeping ahead of demand. Southern Cross is facing potential competition from Pacific Fibre, which is planning a new high capacity NZ-California link.

Hibernia Atlantic today said it is supplying transatlantic capacity to Telefonica International Wholesale. The two additional routes will add diversity to Telefonica’s network, which until now didn’t feature Hibernia bandwidth apparently. They’ve taken on the new capacity to keep up with significant growth in the needs of their multinational customers.

Meanwhile, GlobeNet (news) [a subsidiary of Oi (news)] and TE SubCom say that they have begun construction on the replacement cable for GlobeNet’s Segment 5 cable system, connecting Bermuda and the US. The new 1,350km cable will boost the carrier’s capacity by a factor of 30, and is expected to be complete by the first quarter of next year. This segment was the oldest leg of GlobeNet’s cable system, having been built some fifteen years ago. It will soon be the newest.

And Gulf Bridge International (news) has managed a historic first: they’ve landed a submarine cable in Iraq. This is, I believe, the last piece of the puzzle for GBI prior to launch, and was made more difficult by the fact that they were blazing a new trail. Iraq has, understandably, an atrociously low broadband penetration rate, but one which hopefully is poised for rapid growth. GBI should be formally launching services soon.

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Categories: Undersea cables