Internet backbones in Russia and the world

The length of underwater Internet highways a couple of years ago exceeded 1 million km. Now the total length of such cables is steadily moving towards 2 million km, as new channels are regularly laid. They appear both within the Russian Federation and abroad. Today we will talk about new Internet backbones, as well as various nuances associated with them. All the most interesting is under the cut.

2Africa’s longest internet cable will also connect India

More precisely, it will increase the throughput in this country. The fact is that the Indian telecommunications company Bharti Airtel and the American technology giant Meta have entered into a cooperation agreement. Within its framework, the partners are going to lay the next segment of the 2Africa Pearls submarine cable to the Airtel station (CLS) in Mumbai.

At the moment, this cable is the longest in the world. Experts believe that after adding a new segment, the backbone will provide high-speed access to the network for about 3 billion people. It is planned to launch the cable this year, after which it will strengthen the global Internet infrastructure for 33 countries at once. Some of them are located in Africa, some – in the Middle East and Europe.

The project partners are Telecom Egypt, China Mobile International, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, STC, Vodafone and West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC).

Arctic submarine cable Far North Fiber (FNF) with a length of 17 thousand km


The Internet is needed everywhere, on all continents in all parts of the world. The Arctic and adjacent regions are no exception. A few weeks ago, the Far North Fiber (FNF) project received investment. The participants are American Far North Digital, Japanese Arteria Networks and Finnish Cinia.

According to the plans of the authors of the project, the highway should connect Europe, Asia and North America. Its total length is 17 thousand km. Such a long cable is being laid in the region for the first time, it will be stretched from Europe to Japan through Greenland, Canada and Alaska.

After that, the quality of communication between the islands and continents of the region should improve significantly. In particular, transmission delays between Frankfurt (Germany) and Tokyo (Japan) will be reduced by approximately 30%. True, the project is not being implemented as quickly as we would like – it is planned to be completed by the end of 2016.

As for the cost, it is about $100 million per fiber-optic pair of the backbone, and there are 12 of them here. Well, the same amount will be needed for maintenance. The line is planned to operate for 30 years.

FOCL along the bottom along the bottom of the Bering Sea


Well, here we are talking about a new highway within the borders of the Russian Federation. For example, the Rostelecom company announced the completion of the construction of a submarine fiber-optic communication line (SFOCL) Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky – Anadyr – Coal Mines, laid in the coastal waters of the Bering Sea. At the moment, the channel bandwidth is 100 Gb / s, and the authors of the project have provided for the possibility of improving this characteristic – up to 8 Tb / s.

Due to the peculiarities of the region, laying the line was not easy, but everything worked out in the end. Why was the cable laid? According to the authors of the project, it will significantly increase the level of penetration of digital services in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.

“Before the construction of the optical communication line, Chukotka remained the only subject of the Russian Federation where communication services were provided only using a satellite resource. Today, residents will have the opportunity to fully use modern information technologies and services. The SFOCL also opens up new opportunities that will give a powerful impetus to the region’s digital transformation program,” said Sergey Ivanov, Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for Environmental Protection, Ecology and Transport.

Unity backbone update


In addition to laying new highways, companies are also updating old ones, improving their characteristics. So, a few days ago, Infinera announced its intention to upgrade the Unity submarine cable with new ICE6 800G optical solutions. As you can see in the figure, the cable in question connects the US and Japan, and its length exceeds 9 thousand km.

The backbone was launched back in 2010, then the cable throughput was 4.8 Tbps with the performance of each pair of fibers at the level of only 960 Gbps. Now, thanks to technology upgrades and the introduction of ICE6, the throughput of each pair of fibers is going to be increased to 7.4 Tbps.

This will automatically make the line one of the fastest communication systems between Asia and North America. Well, the upgrade of the line was made possible thanks to the development of the ICE6 GX photonic transceivers developed by Infinera. They are based on the 7nm process technology and modern PIC photonics elements.

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But it will not be possible to supply energy along the bottom of the ocean

This is the largest project that was planned to be implemented by Australia and Singapore. Earlier, a project was announced from Atlassian, a company that was going to supply energy over a 4,000 km long oversea highway.

True, the implementation of this project required not only the creation of a special highway, but also the construction of a new solar power plant. In Australia planned to build 120 km2 of solar panels capable of delivering 3.2 GW of energy, which would be stored in a giant battery, and only then sent to Singapore.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the project, despite the realism of many stages, still will not be developed. The fact is that both the power plant and the energy storage were to become the largest in the world. This is still nothing, but the cable for energy supplies turned out to be very expensive. And this would be half the trouble, but in the region where it was going to be laid, regular earthquakes and bottom movements occur, which leads to cable breaks.

And if the underwater Internet backbone can be repaired quickly enough, then the new energy cable would have to be restored expensively and for a long time.

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