JGA North cable declared ready for service

The 2,700km subsea cable from Japan to Guam that forms the northern section of the Japan-Guam-Australia cable system has been declared ready for service by NEC and RTI.

JGA North is a private cable built by NEC, with RTI being its sole investor. It also received funding from Japan ICT Fund and NEC Capital Solutions. It will have an initial capacity of 24Tbps and is set to increase to 30Tbps in the coming year.

The 9,600km southern section of the cable, JGA South, was built by NEC and Alcatel Submarine Network, and received funding from a consortium of AARnet, Google, and RTI. JGA South has landing stations in Sydney and Sunshine Coast, Australia.

Both JGA sections consist of two fibre pairs.

JGA North and JGA South connect in Guam, where they also hook into the SEA-US cable system between the United States, South-East Asia, and the HK-G system between Guam and Hong Kong.

"JGA North's on-time completion is extraordinary. The subsea cable experts on the ground and at sea overcame obstacle-after-obstacle by closely collaborating -- an art that has become a standard practice over many years," RTI CEO Russ Matulich said.

"It resulted in JGA North's remarkable on-time, and under budget, completion. This exceptional outcome -- against all odds -- confirms what the industry already knows: Money doesn't get cables built, relationships do."

NEC was appointed in June to build the Asia Direct Cable, a 9,400km submarine cable that will connect Hong Kong, China's Guangdong province, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The ADC cable is set to carry in excess of 140Tbps of traffic and be completed by 2022. Investors in the cable include Singtel, CAT, China Telecom, China Unicom, PLDT, SoftBank, Tata Communications, and Viettel.

CABLES ACROSS THE GLOBE

• Vocus' Australia-Singapore Cable (ASC)
• Vocus' North West Cable System (NWCS) between Darwin and Port Hedland, and the new Tiwi Islands spur being added
• The Australian government's Coral Sea subsea cable
• Google's Dunant transatlantic subsea cable between Virginia Beach in the United States to the French Atlantic coast
• The Indigo subsea cable system
• The Indian government's Chennai-Andaman and Nicobar islands subsea cable
• Southern Cross Cables' NEXT subsea cable system between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States
• The Trident subsea cable system connecting Perth with Singapore via Indonesia
• The Jupiter subsea cable connecting the US, Japan, and the Philippines
  
• The Hawaiki subsea cable between Australia, New Zealand, and the US
• Superloop's Hong Kong cable
• Telstra's Hong Kong Americas (HKA) cable between Hong Kong and the US
• Google's Japan-Guam-Australia (JGA) cable system
• The Asia-Pacific Gateway (APG) subsea cable connecting China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore
• The Southeast Asia Japan 2 cable (SJC2)
• The Bay to Bay Express Cable System (BtoBE) connecting Singapore and Hong Kong with the US