Your new favorite trans-Pac subsea cable: Jupiter!

jupiter subsea cable
Image credit: PRNewsfoto/TE Connectivity

SoftBank, NTT Communications, PCCW Global, PLDT, Facebook and Amazon have formed a consortium to build and operate a 14,000 km trans-Pacific submarine cable system – called Jupiter – connecting California and Japan by way of the Philippines.

TE SubCom announced that it has been selected as the system supplier to deploy the Jupiter cable.

The company said it has configured Jupiter as a trunk and branch system using 400-Gbps WDM and WSS (wavelength selective switch) ROADM with gridless, flexible and in-service bandwidth reconfiguration capability on a per wavelength basis, enabling fast and flexible remote switching of transmission routes.

The cable will sport an initial design capacity of more than 60 Tbps, and is expected to be ready for service in early 2020.

“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 SoftBank’s Koji Ishii, co-chairperson 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.”

The cable will connect to landing stations in Los Angeles, Daet (the capital of Camarines Norte province in the Philippines) and two landing stations in Japan (Maruyama and Shima).

NTT Com said in a separate release that it will build a new multilayer-security landing station in Minamiboso, Chiba Prefecture, which will be an extension from the existing Maruyama landing station and serve as NTT Com’s Jupiter termination point.

The carrier will also connect the new Minamiboso landing station with data centers in Tokyo and the Shima landing station with data centers in Osaka, via low-loss optic fiber to boost transmission capacity within Japan.

NTT Com also said the Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE), Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) and Pacific Crossing-1 (PC-1) cables – all of which it owns a stake in – will connect with Jupiter to provide a redundant three-route structure linking major cities in Asia, Japan and the US.

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