TAM 1: REDEFINING REGIONAL CONNECTIVITY ACROSS THE AMERICAS By Alasdair Wilkie
Over the course of my namic network environment. That long career in subsea sys- transition is where the technical decisions we made early on start tems, I’ve come to appre- to prove their value. ciate that the most critical DESIGN PHILOSOPHY: FROM phase of any project be- CABLE SYSTEM TO REGIONgins after the cable is laid. AL PLATFORM
loads. In that context, building a traditional point-to-point cable simply doesn’t make sense. Instead, we approached TAM1 as a platform capable of supporting multiple traffic patterns, multiple customer types, and evolving service models.
It’s relatively easy to talk about When TAFS began the design That philosophy drove several system design, capacity, latency process, we were very conscious key design decisions. First, the or route length. It’s much hard- of the limitations of existing infra- move toward a high fibre-count er to successfully transition that structure in the region. Many of SDM architecture, with up to 24 fiinfrastructure into a fully opera- the legacy cable systems were bre pairs, giving us a fundamental tional, integrated, and scalable built at a time when traffic flows capacity base that can scale over network that performs under re- were relatively predictable, north- time without physical upgrade. al-world conditions. That is exact- south connectivity into the UnitSecond, we prioritised arly the phase we are now in “TAM1 demonstrates how a flexible, chitectural flexibility, enwith TAM1. suring that capacity could
high-capacity regional platform can
be allocated, reallocated, With more than 7,200 kitransform Caribbean and Central and optimised dynamilometres of repeatered American connectivity, improving cally as demand evolves. subsea cable, ten landing points, and a capacity route diversity, operational resilience, And third, we embedded profile that represents a traffic management, and long-term expansion capability into the system from the outstep-change for the Caribscalability.” set, rather than treating it bean and Central America, as a future retrofit. These TAM1 is not simply another ed States, limited intra-regional choices may not be visible at a regional system. It is a platform, demand, and a small number of high level, but they fundamentally one that has been designed to support the evolution of the re- dominant operators. That world shape how the system operates. gion’s digital ecosystem over has changed completely. ROUTE DESIGN AND LANDdecades. As we move from build Today, traffic flows are far more ING STRATEGY into operation (and maintenance), distributed, driven by cloud platthe focus shifts from engineering forms, content delivery networks, From a route perspective, TAM1 a system to making it work as part regional data centre growth, and was designed to address one of a much larger and more dy- increasingly by AI-driven work- of the long-standing structural 60
SUBBTEL FORUM | Issue 149