WJI July 2018 Feature Sample

WIRE JOURNAL JULY 2018

®

INTERNATIONAL www.wirenet.org

Industry Innovation & NASHVILLE WRAPUP

OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE WIRE ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL

FEATURE

Industry Innovation

Innovation comes in many forms, and while one may instinctively think of new technology—and this feature has several very good examples of that—it can also be found in other aspects, such as business strategy, assimilating a very large acquisition, a multi-company R&D effort, and more.

Submarine Cables: a market whose peak seems to be out of sight Headlines of new investments in submarine cables continue to flood the market to the point where it seems impossible for the average person to keep up. One person who can is Winston Que, who in 2011 launched submarinenetworks.com to share information on submarine cable systems and networks worldwide and insight analysis on capacity market, and discuss with the peers. Below, he shares his perspective with WJI. WJI: The current cubmarine cable market seems quite strong: how long do you see this continuing?

Winston: We can definitely say that investment in submarine cables is now booming, much more so than it did in the 2000s. TeleGeography forecasts there will be US$8.7 billion of investment in new cables between 2018 and 2020, and I think it may be even more than that as it is hard to take all the planning projects into the forecast.

The investment reflects the growing demands for international bandwidth, and especially demands from Over The Top (OTT) and cloud operators.

In the past three years, almost all the subsea cable projects were backed by investment from one or two OTT players. Google, Facebook and Microsoft have invested in 20 subsea cable systems. Amazon has also invested in the Kawaiki and JUPITER cables. Will other OTT players, such as Alibaba and Apple, invest in subsea cables? I think that is a great probability in the near future. On the other hand, wholesale telecom operators are all preparing for 5G, which may consume 10 times the bandwidth compared with current 4G applications. So, I expect that there will be continuing growth in submarine cable systems in at least the next five years, with many more new project announcements.

WJI: The cable system designs all seem to keep topping each other in terms of the terabit capacity: what is the current upper limit and is there any sense of how much higher that could go?

Winston: The trend is for new cable systems to have a higher design capacity than the existing ones, but that is not always true. For example, consider cable systems in the Pacific region. PLCN set a record of 144 Tbps of design capacity when the project was announced in late 2015, and two other following projects—HKA and JUPITER—launched in early 2018 were designed with less capacity of 80 Tbps and 60 Tbps respectively. It certainly was feasible for those two systems to have had a higher design capacity.

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Winston Qiu, the founder and managing editor of submarinenetworks.com WJI: What technical aspects limit the potential capacity a given system can offer?

Winston: According to the characteristics of optical fiber, there is a limited portion of optical spectrum that is suitable for long-distance optical fiber communication, i.e., the 1550 nm Window with low attenuation from 1530 nm to 1625 nm. This available spectrum is divided into two bands, the Conventional-band (C-band) from 1530 to 1565 nm and the Long-band (L-band) from 1565 nm to 1625 nm. C-band technology is commonly used in subsea and terrestrial optical fiber cable systems.

The application of L-band is rare.

Normally, there are three approaches to increase the design capacity of a cable system: 1) Accommodating more wavelengths (channels) in the limited 1550 nm window; 2) Increasing the speed or capacity per wavelength; or 3) Designing with more fiber pairs.

PLCN uses the first approach, using both C-band and L-band to double the waves up to 240 wavelengths of 100 Gbps each, so as to achieve design capacity of 144 Tbps in a six-fiber-pair system. JUPITER uses the second

WJI: Are projects that include multiple partners better positioned to succeed?

Winston: Yes, it seems true. Multiple parties are good to share the cost and achieve a high utilization of a cable system, which lowers the cost of unit bandwidth. Even for a private cable project, the builder or private investor is always looking for partners as shadow investors or anchor customers, but more is not always better. A crowded consortium is most likely to prolong the time to enter into

market for a project.

I prefer a project model with a single entity as the builder, owner and operator, while the project itself is backed by four to six partners or anchor customers.

WJI: Is there a never-ending demand for bandwidth that can support all the announced projects?

Winston: I do not think that is the case. As I understand, for every cable project, the investors or the consortium must have done a feasibility study before announcing the project. There must be certain demands driving a new project. That can be demands for bandwidth, demands for diversity, and/or demands from new players and competitors, but a basis has to exist. (cont’d. on p. 57)

Use of a baseball movie analogy scores for a Georgia county fiber optic project Following a memorable presentation last month in Georgia by Information Technology Director Will Lyons, the Paulding County Commission decided that physical location was less important than connectivity, and voted to spend more than $500,000 to extend its fiber network.

The project, reported in the West Georgia Neighbor, is noteworthy for the appeal that was made for its approval.

“You’ve all heard that cliché, ‘Build it and they will come,’” Lyons said. “I can’t tell you that (employers will come). What I will tell you is we’re getting cut off the list by not having it. If you don’t build it, they will not come,” he said. “This is all about job creation. This is about bringing companies into the county that need that internal bandwidth.”

The commission approved a bid of $534,260 for the design and construction of a project to extend the county’s fiber optic cable network in northeast Paulding. The project calls for the installation of about six miles of fiber optic lines that are needed to create a second connection and assure users their service will not be interrupted.

Lyons said that the project completes a part of one initiative county officials have been planning since the Parker FiberNet fiber network was made available earlier this decade. “It ties us in to that second Tier 1 (connection) so that (we can tell) the next company that needs two redundant Tier 1 providers...‘Yes, we have that,’” he said.

Lyons told commissioners that Paulding needs to have the upgraded system available before employers like Google will even consider an area like Paulding County.

Google operates a major Metro Atlanta data center in

Last month, an IT director in Georgia updated a scene from a 1989 movie, “Field of Dreams,” only the attraction he was selling was not baseball but bandwidth.

Lithia Springs in Douglas County. He cited an industry publication that said that in a survey of areas showing industrial growth, one-third were able to grow without direct interstate highway access—like Paulding—because they had redundant fiber optic cable service available.

“Companies that require and survive on internet access cannot risk outages,” Lyons said. “Therefore having a single provider gives them little protection in the event of an internet provider issue.

The project will be funded with Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax revenues. The extension will result in a total of 18 miles of cable available, Lyons said. The route was chosen because it completes a connection to a Tier 1 provider, and officials anticipate areas along the route could develop with industrial uses in the future, Lyons said.

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FEATURE

approach with its state-of-the-art technology, transmitting 400 Gbps in a single wavelength.

With the application of 400 Gbps DWDM technology, Ciena has deployed 30.4 Tbps capacity (76 channel of 400 Gbps each) in a single fiber pair for an 880 km reach.

The next step is to make above 400 Gbps technology available for cables with ultra-long distance, such as 10,000 km. Then we may have a system with 240 Tbps or even 480 Tbps of capacity. We expect to see 1 Tbps per wavelength to be commercialized in a subsea cable system within five years.