Transpacific submarine cable gets LA access point
Tue 17 Jan 2017
The CoreSite data center in Los Angeles has been selected as the West Coast access point for the SEA-US transpacific cable. Once operational, the transpacific submarine line will connect the West Coast of the U.S. to international access points in Hawaii, Indonesia, Guam, and the Philippines.
The transpacific cable is intended to provide customers with improved latency and speed of connection to address demands for mobile and broadband content across the world. The underwater cable system is over 15,000 km long and was engineered specifically to bypass areas of South Asia that are prone to earthquakes and natural disasters, to address concerns about stable and reliable connectivity.
The cable is expected to be operational by the second quarter of this year. It is made of 2-fiber-pair cable combined with optical transmission technologies, which are expected to have an initial capacity of 20 terabits per second (Tb/s).
Current submarine cable systems linking the US and Asia have capacities that range from 80 Gb/s for the China-US CN, to FASTER, which provides connections up to 60 Tb/s. The Pacific Light Cable Network, an underwater cable project from Google and Facebook, is hoped to provide up to 120 Tb/s of capacity when it comes online in late 2018.
CoreSite, which has 17 data centers in eight metro markets in the United States, will host the SEA-US submarine line terminating equipment (SLTE) at its LA data center campus which includes two sites – 1 Wilshire, also known as LA1, and LA2, located in downtown Los Angeles, with over 424,000 square feet of scalable data center space.
Paul Szurek, CEO of CoreSite, said: “The SEA-US submarine cable system will be the sixth subsea cable to offer direct access from our Los Angeles campus, augmenting the importance of CoreSite’s data center platform in the trans-Pacific route to key Indonesian and Asian markets.”
A direct connection to SEA-US is expected to benefit CoreSite customers by providing a low latency, state-of-the-art route between the continental United States and Southeast Asia.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the SEA-US license last week. Construction has commenced, with NEC tasked with building the cable for a seven-member consortium of partners including Globe Telecom, Hawaiian Telecom, and Telin.
The Hermosa Beach landing station for the submarine cable will be connected to the CoreSite data center campus using a privately operated fiber optic network.
