Jupiter will run 14,000km from Daet in the Philippines and both Maruyama and Shima in Japan to Hermosa Beach, south of Los Angeles, California, and it is due to be ready for service in 2020. It will have an initial design capacity of more than 60Tbps.
The consortium partners, apart from Amazon and Facebook, are NTT Communications, PCCW Global, PLDT and SoftBank.
“The demand for bandwidth in the Pacific region continues to grow at a remarkable rate, and is accompanied by the rise of capacity-dependent applications like live video, augmented and virtual reality, and 4k/8k video,” said Koji Ishii, general manager at SoftBank Telecom and co-chair of the Jupiter consortium.
“Jupiter will provide the necessary diversity of connections and the highest capacity available to meet the needs of the evolving marketplace,” said Ishii. “TE SubCom has a proven record of success in the design and implementation of innovative, scalable and robust transoceanic cable systems, making the company the most reliable choice for the Jupiter supply partner.”
TE SubCom president Sanjay Chowbey said: “Submarine cable systems continue to have a critical impact on the global economy, as well as cultural, educational and medical advancement around the world. It is our privilege to help facilitate the growth of global connectivity and provide reliable, high-capacity and low-latency transmission to regions where bandwidth is at a premium. We look forward to the next phases of what will be a high quality and industry leading system implementation.”
TE SubCom has configured Jupiter as a trunk and branch system with what it calls the most advanced submersible reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing (ROADM) technology available. This is implemented with wavelength selective switch technology providing ROADM nodes with gridless, flexible and in-service bandwidth reconfiguration capability on a per-wavelength basis. Nodes are further equipped with a telemetry channel that allows access to undersea spectral performance information.
“TE SubCom has been deploying progressively more advanced optical add/drop multiplexing technology in various undersea applications since 2009,” said Mark Enright, TE SubCom’s VP fpr customer solutions. “The ROADM nodes in the Jupiter design are our most advanced form of this technology to date, providing unprecedented bandwidth reconfiguration flexibility in an undersea network.”
