DOCOMO Pacific, a service provider in the Marianas and a subsidiary of Japan’s NTT DOCOMO, announced that construction and testing of the 183-mile ATISA submarine optical cable system connecting Guam to the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) has been completed and the system is now ready for service.
The ATISA submarine cable, for which a supply contract was signed in February 2016, was recently landed and connected to the terrestrial fibre networks on Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Rota. The system will be launched with an initial operating capacity of 200 Gbit/s, while offering a total design capacity of 7.2 Tbit/s.
DOCOMO Pacific will now begin providing connectivity services to enterprise customers, and stated that it is already serving its first enterprise partner, the Commonwealth Port Authority, which operates the Francisco C. Ada Saipan international airport, with high-speed Internet connectivity. ATISA also connects the CNMI with Guam, where local businesses and government agencies can connect to other cable systems.
Additionally, from August this year, DOCOMO Pacific plans to start offering mobile, cable TV, online and home telephone services for residential customers in the CNMI.
For the ATISA cable system, DOCOMO Pacific selected NEC to design and build the cable and Ciena’s submarine GeoMesh solution to provide 100 Gbit/s wavelengths and to facilitate the delivery of new on-demand services for end users. The Ciena solution is designed to offer scalability to support communications requirements over the lifetime of the cable.
Additionally, Ocean Specialists (OSI), a submarine optical cable consulting firm, advised DOCOMO Pacific on the project and provided project management support.
DOCOMO Pacific noted that ATISA is the second undersea cable in the CNMI and the first new system to be built in nearly twenty years. The company stated that the cable system involved investment of over $16 million for the cable, plus an additional $9 million to modernise and expand its fixed and mobile networks in the CNMI.
