The AAE-1 Consortium, owners of the proposed Asia-Africa-Europe-1 submarine network cable, and TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company reported last week that the contract for the majority of segments of the AAE-1 system has come into force.
Announced in January, AAE-1 will link Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe with low-latency, high-capacity optical transmission. Each trunk fiber-pair in AAE-1 segments supplied by TE SubCom will have a cross-sectional capacity of a minimum 80x100 Gbps and each branch is implemented with optical add/drop multiplexing (OADM) nodes containing TE SubCom’s OADM wavelength re-use technology.
The two parties say the AAE-1 submarine cable, spanning approximately 25,000 km, will be one of the first unique cable systems connecting Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Europe and will provide an alternative low-latency route between the Far East and Europe, with the Middle East and Africa as key mid-system hubs. Its completion will provide additional protection and diversity to the existing heavily congested cable systems.
The consortium also says the undersea cable system will contribute significantly to growth in the involved countries and will eventually connect more than 40% of the world’s population. When completed, the AAE-1 system will connect landings in Hong Kong SAR, (China), Vietnam, Cambodia, Kuala Kurau (Malaysia), Satun (Thailand), Mumbai (India), Karachi (Pakistan), Al Bustan (Oman), Fujairah (UAE), Doha (Qatar), Aden (Yemen), Djibouti, Jeddah (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), Zafarana and Abu Talat (Egypt), Chania (Greece), Marseille (France), plus other landings under development.
“With its unique, low-latency short route and high capacity, AAE-1 will link all major Southeast Asian countries to Africa and Europe via the Middle East, offering customers unmatched capacity, thus stimulating exponential ICT-based business growth,” said Troy Yunfeng Li, AAE-1 chair.
AAE-1 will deploy 100-Gbps technology with wavelength add/drop branching units with a design capacity of over 40 Tbps. The target completion date for AAE-1 cable construction is 2016.
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