JOHN WILLIAMSON
Shipshape: Cable layer Reliance is involved in installing new transatlantic optical links.
was completed in 2010, and its stake in the Southeast Asia-Japan Cable opened in mid-2013. Meanwhile, Facebook became an investor in the forthcoming Asia-Pacific Gateway fibre system in mid-2012. It remains to be seen whether the involvement of such non-traditional investors will progress to the point where a long haul subsea fibre system can be financed with no carrier shareholders. But some experts say they think it’s definitely a possibility.
58.95 milliseconds from New York to London, which was faster by more than half a millisecond than the original projected speed. Again, Microsoft emphasises the importance of lower latency for its customers on both the Hibernia Express Cable System and AEConnect. New faces In fact, Microsoft is one of the investors in these two cables, as it is in the 13,000 km, up to 80 Tbits/s, New Cross Pacific Cable Network that will link the USA with China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.
These Microsoft investments reflect another notable trend in the subsea fibre cable sector – the increased hands-on participation by non-traditional players in the business. Google has invested in the new FASTER cable, running a 9,000 km route from the USA to Japan with an initial capacity of 60Tbits/s (100 Gbits/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fibre pairs), and in a 10,566 km system to link Brazil with Florida. The search engine colossus has form here, with its investment in the 9,600 km Trans-Pacific Unity cable that
can impact the profitability of trading operations.” TeleGeography also quotes the eye-catching calculation from online retail giant Amazon that every 100 milliseconds of latency reduces its sales by 1 percent. For their part, cable owners, operators and users now certainly play up the low latency cable system performance angle. In September 2015, for instance, Hibernia Networks announced that its trans- Atlantic cable had an actual tested latency of better than
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