This is the final stage of a very big project. Orange announces the commissioning of the Amitié submarine cable, which connects Europe and North America, “on the densest submarine route in the world” announces the operator. The project lasted almost 4 years.
In detail, the Friendship cable is the property of Facebook. It has a total length of 6,800 km. It has 16 fiber pairs with a maximum capacity of 400 Tbit/s. Orange has two pairs of optical fibers on this new system.
The cable emerges in the United States at Lynn, near Boston, and at Le Porge, near Bordeaux, on the French side, and Bude in England.
The installation of this cable has experienced some twists and turns
The construction of this gigantic project, estimated at 250 million euros, was entrusted to the French specialist Alcatel Submarine Networks, a subsidiary of the Finnish Nokia, while Orange acts – as on the Dunant cable – as a “landing party”. In France, as responsible for the French part of the cable, Orange is in charge of the operation and maintenance of the system’s landing station from the limit of French territorial waters to the new Equinix data center based in Bordeaux.
The installation of this cable has experienced some twists and turns. In 2021, technical difficulties (bad weather conditions, etc.) delayed the work. This is why it is being put into service now, although its initial entry into service was planned for early 2022.
The Amitié cable complements another mega-submarine cable, called Dunant (financed by Google), and commissioned in January 2021.
“The Dunant and Amitié cables take completely separate routes”
“The Dunant and Amitié cables take completely separate routes, thus avoiding any risk of cuts on this strategic axis” notes Orange. Their respective latency is 38ms (Ashburn – Paris) for Dunant and 34ms (Bordeaux – New York) for Amitié.
These two mega cables have been designed to keep pace with future generations of optical transmission technologies. They are able to maintain a high level of performance for the next 20 years assures the operator.
Together, these submarine fiber optic cables have a capacity greater than that of all existing systems in service on the transatlantic front.
“With 571 Tbps of international bandwidth used, the transatlantic is the largest intercontinental route”
According to Telegeography, “with 571 Tbps of international bandwidth used, the transatlantic remains by far the largest intercontinental route. It is twice as busy as the trans-Pacific route, the second largest in the world.
The Dunant and Amitié projects confirm the growing importance taken by digital giants in the fiber optic connectivity ecosystem. “Today, the market is gradually dominated by GAFA, which could represent 80% of the bandwidth passing through submarine cables within two to three years,” explained Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Networks Director. and International Services at Orange, interviewed in spring 2019 by ZDNet.
Although Google today dominates its competitors in the submarine cable market, with soon 15 cables to its credit (including five directly owned), the American giant is closely followed by other American digital giants, whether i.e. Facebook (12 cables), Microsoft (5 cables) and Amazon (5 cables).