Deep Blue Cable has selected TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company (NYSE: TEL), to construct its planned submarine cable system of the same name. The Deep Blue undersea fiber-optic network will link the Caribbean islands and to the Americas, with an in-service date of fourth quarter 2019.
The submarine network will span nearly 12,000 km. Its initial dozen landing points include the Cayman Islands, Curaçao, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Trinidad & Tobago, and Turks & Caicos Islands in addition to two diverse landings in the U.S. One landing will reach the U.S. on the Gulf Coast of Florida, which the St. Lucia based submarine cable system operator asserts is a first.
The undersea cable network, with an initial capacity of 6 Tbps per fiber pair, will be designed to supply direct fiber connections among major traffic hubs in the region as well as optical add/drop connections to the area's smaller markets. Deep Blue Cable touts higher design capacity, lower unit costs, lower latency through direct connectivity, and the ability to leverage advances in reliability, such as improved route planning and installation techniques, as differentiators for the planned network.
The optical systems TE SubCom will provide as part of its responsibilities include the optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM) branching unit technology necessary to support a variety of landings in markets of varying size. "Deep Blue Cable has great confidence in TE SubCom and its ability to build a state-of-the-art subsea cable system that will provide long overdue advanced connectivity across the Caribbean islands and to the Americas," commented Stephen Scott, CEO of Deep Blue Cable. "The Deep Blue cable system will play a critical role in serving developing Caribbean countries that are now experiencing a surge in demand for advanced telecom services and currently rely on fiber-optic connectivity that is technologically and economically disadvantaged."
Added Mike Rieger, vice president of sales at TE SubCom, "In a region that has experienced no significant fiber-optic deployment in recent years, this submarine cable will satisfy not only the current spike in demand for connectivity in developing Caribbean countries, but also future requirements driven by projected growth."
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