The Southeast Asia – U.S. or (SEA-US) Cable System publicly marked key milestones and closed in on others with the completion of the installation of its state-of-the-art undersea fiber optic cable network by the second quarter of 2017. Last week, the Hermosa Beach, California shore-end was successfully connected. On January 12, 2017, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted the SEA-US cable landing license. By the end of January 2017 the construction of California’s cable landing station will be completed. In February 2017 the installation vessel will arrive in Honolulu, Hawaii, after completing its main-lay construction between California and Hawaii.
Essential to the SEA-US Cable System’s reliability is the location and protection of mission-critical equipment on land. The SEA-US consortium members chose CoreSite (NYSE:COR), a premier provider of secure, reliable, high-performance data center and interconnection solutions across the United States, to house the SEA-US Cable System’s submarine line terminating equipment (SLTE) at CoreSite’s purpose built LA2 data center in downtown Los Angeles, California. The SEA-US Cable System’s unique design provides its users with additional protection between the Hermosa Beach, California landing and CoreSite’s LA2 data center over physically diverse dark fiber pairs.
The historic US $250 million SEA-US Cable System is being constructed by NEC Corporation. When completed, the system will deliver an initial design capacity of 20 Terabit per second (Tb/s) capacity, using NEC’s state-of-the-art 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) technology. This capacity will help to meet the exponentially growing demand for bandwidth between Asia and North America, while also enabling onward connectivity to existing and planned submarine cable systems.
The SEA-US Cable System investors consist of the following consortium members: Globe Telecom (Manila, Philippines), GTA (Tamuning, Guam), GTI (Los Angeles, California), Hawaiian Telcom (Honolulu, Hawaii), RTI (San Francisco, California), Telin (Jakarta, Indonesia) and Telkom USA (Los Angeles, California).