A West Coast Boom for Subsea Cables

Submarine Cable Map, courtesy of TeleGeography.

Subsea cables are the underpinning of global communications. Cables traverse the seas and ultimately connect to terrestrial networks at Cable Landing Stations (CLS) on-shore where they interconnect to data centers. Not much wider than a garden hose, these systems power the internet and support all of the bandwidth needed to fuel our smart phones, applications, social media, data, video and all of the new technologies currently in development. In the past few years, we have seen a wave of new projects and systems led by traditional carriers, as well as new entrants in the market. Last year alone, over 62k miles of submarine cables were added globally, as reported by SubTel Forum.

​Web giants, hyperscale cloud companies and content providers, are building out their own systems to capitalize on new technologies, increase capacity, realize greater efficiencies and control the massive amounts of data that flows from continent to continent.
The US West coast - around LA and surrounding areas in particular - is experiencing a boom of subsea cable builds, the most activity in over 15 years, with cable systems such as:

• SEA-US - connecting LA to Hawaii, Philippines, Indonesia, Guam
• Hong Kong-Americas (HKA) - a partnership with Facebook and other telecoms, which connects LA, Hong Kong and Taiwan
• Jupiter - which links LA, Japan, and Philippines
• Curie - owned by Google and bridges LA to Valparaiso, Chile
• Pacific Light Cable Network – with over 8,000 miles of cable built by Facebook and Google to connect LA to China, Philippines and Taiwan

All of this activity is aimed at serving the capacity needs for west coast content providers, carriers and large enterprises. It is also attracting Chinese operators, and cloud computing and service providers who look to establish a presence in the US and want to leverage LA colocation, coupled with low latency connectivity to the Asia-Pac region.
Experts predict that, by 2019, the Asia-Pacific region will generate the most web-traffic in the world – double the volume generated in North America. As a result, data centers like West 7 Center serve a critical role as reliable colocation partners, providing mission-critical infrastructure and support for the flow of data from the US across the Pacific Ocean.

West 7 Center located in the heart of downtown LA, and provides a secure juncture point for organizations that not only require large colocation footprints, but also want low latency connectivity. Our location provides the added advantage of proximity, which is essential for content delivery, IoT applications, mission-critical workloads, finance and media. Telcos can establish backhaul from West 7 Center to other CLS and the many infrastructure nodes in the region.
With 16 global and domestic carriers on-site and 172,000 square feet of space available, West 7’s Tier III facility offers an attractive and reliable gateway to Asia and can be a reliable and secure point across the end-to-end infrastructure that is needed on the terrestrial side of the subsea cables.

We can expect to see more capacity projects and growth in this arena as global telecom operators try to keep pace with the incredible demand for internet, data and voice traffic – coming from Latin America, Asia and Europe, into the US.

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