The new year did not start on a positive note for Tonga, with the submerged Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupting with more force than an atomic bomb, according to NASA.
 
The eruption caused tsunamis throughout the Pacific, leading to at least five fatalities and causing almost $100 million in damage.
 
Naturally, such an enormous natural disaster had an immediate impact on local submarine cable infrastructure, with a large portion of the 827km Tonga Cable damaged, leaving the country largely without international communications…

The new year did not start on a positive note for Tonga, with the submerged Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupting with more force than an atomic bomb, according to NASA.

The eruption caused tsunamis throughout the Pacific, leading to at least five fatalities and causing almost $100 million in damage.

Emergency satellite connectivity was quickly deployed, but these proved of limited use in the early days after the explosion due to the amount of ash cast up into the atmosphere. 

Now, over a month since the cable first went offline, Digicel Tonga have confirmed that the international section of the cable is functional once again and connectivity has been restored, having left the country offline for 38 days.

 « We had some capacity via satellite but nothing compared to what we’re having right now with the cable being reconnected, » said Tonga Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni. « It was a major task, given the amount of damage, and we thought it would be fixed a week ago.”

Initial appraisals for the damaged cable expected it to be back online by February 10, but poor weather conditions and the damage being more severe than expected presented a significant setback. 

SubCom’s cable ship Reliance performed the repairs, reportedly adding around 92km of cable to reconnect the cable. Some of the severed sections of the cable could be recovered and reconnected relatively easily, but a section of roughly 55km could not be located at all. 

“We suspect it’s buried in an avalanche,” said James Panuve, CEO of Tonga Cable.

While this news means that Tonga’s main island of Tongatapu can now reconnect to the international community, the cable repairs are far from over. Domestic portions of the cable, Tongatapu to some of the outer islands, were much closer to the initial explosion and remain heavily damaged, with repairs to these sections potentially taking many months.

Nonetheless, the reactivation of the main body of the Tonga Cable should present some relief to these smaller islands by allowing satellite capacity previously serving the main island to be reallocated to the rest of the archipelago.

This disaster has thrown Tonga’s reliance on a single submarine cable into sharp relief, with authorities now questioning whether backup connectivity to the island is sufficient. 

The procurement of a backup cable would, of course, be the method of choice, but this is prohibitively expensive and is unlikely to materialise without major support from the governments of major economic players in the region, like Australia and New Zealand. 

Therefore, even greater reliance on satellite could be required in future. Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s SpaceX was reportedly at work in neighbouring Fiji to establish a Starlink Gateway, helping to provide the region with faster, more reliable connectivity. The company has reportedly donated 50 satellite terminals directly to the Tongan government to help plug the gaps while the domestic sections of the cable are repaired.

“Elon Musk has given some satellite capacity, it is very fast and the MEIDECC are deciding who and where that will be placed,” said Panuve.

Also in the news: 

There is no question that the submarine fiber optics industry is enjoying an unprecedented period of strong demand for new cable systems.  The end of 2021 marked an extraordinary eight years of solid and sometimes spectacular growth for the market.  For an industry that traditionally saw a boom and bust cycle ever three-to-four years, the strength of the market during this period is something that has never been seen before.
In fact, the global submarine cable network is literally being rebuilt by new players using new methods and technologies…

There is no question that the submarine fiber optics industry is enjoying an unprecedented period of strong demand for new cable systems.  The end of 2021 marked an extraordinary eight years of solid and sometimes spectacular growth for the market.  For an industry that traditionally saw a boom and bust cycle ever three-to-four years, the strength of the market during this period is something that has never been seen before.

In fact, the global submarine cable network is literally being rebuilt by new players using new methods and technologies.  The “Over-the-Top” content providers are essentially overlaying a new transoceanic network on top of the existing global network.  This new network has capacities never before dreamed of thanks to Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM).  With SDM, fiber counts are increasing, first from 12 pairs to 24 pairs, with even more pairs are envisioned in the near future.  Total capacity on these cables has jumped from a few dozen Terabits per second (Tbps) to over 100 Tbps and soon to over 200 Tbps, all within just a handful of years.  

And while in the past the term “global network” actually referred more to connections between large cities throughout the world than a network that truly served the global community, today’s global network literally is being taken to the ends of the earth.  

Recently, we have seen submarine cables being deployed in the Amazon River Basin, to the island of St. Helena (considered one of the most remote inhabited islands on the planet), to the tip of South America and to numerous small islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  And then there are the Polar Regions.  Multiple projects for the Arctic and even the Antarctic are now being proposed and taken seriously.  

But the explosion in submarine cable demand is not confined to the number of cables, their capacities and their locations.  Other applications are being found for cables, most notably the use of commercial submarine cables for scientific data collection in addition to carrying the usual Internet traffic.  This application takes several forms, including SMART (Scientific Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications) Cables, Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) and State of Polarization (SOP) and could lead to improved tsunami warning capabilities, improved understanding of subsea geological activities such as earthquakes and volcanoes and many other possibilities.

DAS and SOP are being studied and tested on multiple cables around the world, but let’s focus on SMART for a moment.  2021 saw several major developments, beginning with an endorsement of the technology by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.  This was followed by a more than $7 million award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to set the groundwork for the use of SMART technology on a planned cable connecting New Caledonia and Vanuuta.  In the Atlantic, the Portuguese government has become a leading proponent of the technology and plans to use SMART on an upcoming domestic cable system connecting the mainland with the Azores and Madeira Islands.  We are about to see the dawning of a new era of ocean exploration based on submarine cables.

The current boom in submarine cable demand already has lasted far longer than most expected.  While there are no objective data to indicate that this will end soon, the reality is that it will end at some point.  But when it does, it will be a in a world consisting of a network of massive subsea data pipes carrying Internet traffic to every corner of the globe, while at the same time providing us with undreamt amounts of scientific data that will enable us to understand our oceans like never before.  

This is the real future of the submarine cable market.  

Last week, rumours were emerging suggesting that the owners of VMO2 – Liberty Global and Telefonica – had entered into discussions with investors for the creation of a new JV to help accelerate the rollout of FTTP in the UK.
At the time, sources were suggesting that VMO2 would be looking to raise as much as £1 billion to help launch the new business…

Last week, rumours were emerging suggesting that the owners of VMO2 – Liberty Global and Telefonica – had entered into discussions with investors for the creation of a new JV to help accelerate the rollout of FTTP in the UK.

At the time, sources were suggesting that VMO2 would be looking to raise as much as £1 billion to help launch the new business, which would target areas VMO2’s FTTP network currently is not set to reach. 

Now, alongside announcing their financial results, VMO2 have confirmed that they are indeed in discussions with a number of potential investors to take part in a JV. This JV will aim to build a new FTTP network covering roughly 7 million premises by 2027, which will then be offered on a wholesale basis to UK operators. VMO2, naturally, will be an anchor tenant of the new network. 

Ultimately, seeking partners for additional network investment should come as little surprise, with VMO2 having said last year that it would prefer not to fund the rollout of FTTP to another 7 million on its own. In the past few years we have seen numerous rumours related to UK ISPs that could potentially have joined forces with Virgin Media to facilitate this joint build, though until now they have never been confirmed.

If all goes to plan, once completed this new network will expand VMO2’s total gigabit reach to roughly 23 million premises, presenting a serious challenge to UK incumbent Openreach.

However, its rollout still has a long way to go. 

VMO2 currently has around 1.2 million premises with FTTP and is aiming to increase that figure to 7 million by 2027. The company said today that they expect to add roughly 500,000 new premises to the FTTP network in 2022, though this pace will need to be accelerated if they hope to reach their 7 million target.

BT, meanwhile, already has roughly 6 million premises covered by FTTP and is planning to spend £15 billion to increase this total to 25 million premises by 2025.

For the time being, however, VMO2 can claim to be ‘the country’s largest gigabit provider’, having announced back in December last year that they had fully completed their network upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 technology, allowing their full 15.5 million covered premises to access gigabit-capable broadband. 

What impact would the creation of new major fibre wholesaler have on the UK broadband market? Find out from the experts at this year’s Connected Britain conference 

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