Google's Dunant transatlantic cable makes landfall in France

Google’s transatlantic Dunant cable has landed in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, in the Vendée region of France. The terrestrial stage of the laying of this cable is proceeding.

As the “Landing Party” and owner of the French part of the cable, Orange has completely refurbished the historic station in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, which was no longer in use, to house the terminal equipment for the Dunant system. This area is a strategic location, close to the main connectivity hubs on this side of the Atlantic. From this landing station, Orange is deploying terrestrial optical fibres in France between Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez and Paris to route its traffic on the Dunant cable to the capital’s major Data Centres and will also provide service to the rest of Europe and major international Data Centres.

Orange will benefit from two pairs of optical fibres with a capacity of up to 30Tbps each.

“We are very pleased with the arrival of the Dunant cable in France. It is the concrete realization of a project in co-construction with Google that will enable us to respond to the explosion of Internet usage over the long term. This partnership strengthens Orange’s role as a world leader in the investment, deployment, maintenance and operation of strategic infrastructures. The landing of Dunant on our shores once again places France at the heart of the global digital development,” said Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Senior Vice President, International Networks and Services at Orange.

Orange and Telxius to backhaul Google’s Dunant transatlantic cable

Orange and Telxius will provide terrestrial backhaul extensions in France and in the US for Google’s Dunant submarine cable, which is expected to enter service in late 2020.

Under this agreement, Orange and Telxius offer co-location services at their respective Cable Landing Stations in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez (France) and Virginia Beach (US).

From its Saint- Hilaire-de-Riez (85) Cable Landing Station, Orange will enable terrestrial connection to Telxius up to Paris, while Telxius will connect Orange to Ashburn from Virginia Beach.

This collaboration represents a strong transatlantic bridge as both companies can effectively provide multi- terabit capacity on this Europe-US route. It also reinforces Orange and Telxius’ respective positions to support the development of new digital usages for their international customers in Europe and America and bolsters the international leadership position of both companies on the wholesale market to better address the needs of content-providers and third-party operators.

“We are pleased to announce this agreement with Telxius, which will allow us to provide our customers with very high capacity end-to-end services, as well as network redundancy, on the strategic transatlantic route. We will be operating two fiber pairs of over 30 terabits per second between France and the USA. It is a valuable extension to Orange’s global network joining our Atlantic and Mediterranean routes to Africa, the Middle East and Asia with guaranteed best in class quality of service,” said Jerome Barré, CEO of Orange Wholesale and International Networks.

Google’s Dunant cable leverages SDM for 250 Tbps capacity

Google’s Dunant submarine cable system, which will link the U.S. and France, will be the first subsea cable to leverage space-division multiplexing (SDM), enabling 250 terabits per second capacity.

In a blog posting, Vijay Vusirikala, Director of Network Architecture and Optical Engineering at Google, says SDM will increase cable capacity in a cost-effective manner.

Dunant’s design uses twelve fiber pairs and power-optimized repeaters. Whereas traditional subsea cables are powered from the shore end and rely on a dedicated set of pump lasers to amplify the optical signal for each fiber pair, SDM allows pump lasers and associated optical components to be shared among multiple fiber pairs.