FEATURE
VIRGINIA BEACH: THE NEXT CHAPTER
Increasing the Atlantic’s Resiliency, Stability and Capacity
M
ore than two years ago SemanticNet started working on the “Fibre Atlantic” concept – an open-access diverse fiber optic submarine cable system between Bordeaux, France and Virginia Beach. In our January 2016 article in SubTel Forum Magazine we described the current state of the Atlantic infrastructure. We concluded that the best strategy is to utilize three or four paths across the Atlantic in order to minimize the probability of a complete network outage. We proposed that in order to improve resilience, newly developed systems between Europe and the USA should consider an alternate path, such as between Virginia Beach and Bordeaux. There are various reasons to land a cable in Virginia Beach, but the main one is a more diverse route across the Atlantic and a direct interconnection between Europe and the Ashburn/ Dulles datacenter hub. Over the years I have written three articles. Two focused on the Atlantic infrastructure and one about Virginia Beach. It comes as no surprise this last article has caught some traction over the last 18 months or so. Virginia Beach is hot! It’s the “next big thing” in subsea world. So, its maybe a good time to review my previous article and see what has happened so far, and what’s in store for us!
A REVIEW
In my 2016 article about Virginia Beach I made a few,
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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE
BY HUBERT SOUISA
maybe sometimes bold, claims. In the first place, the Bullseye of the American Internet is not New York city. It’s true, NYC is where most of the Atlantic cable systems come ashore, but this is due to historical idea’s and the tendency of old stakeholders to keep it with the tried and tested. Nevertheless, its well-known Virginia state is the home of one of the US’s large Internet hub, Ashburn, Virginia. More than 16 large datacenters and more than 60 datacenters in the state, it is the place to be. Secondly, the growth in traffic. Its obvious the large players such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google have a big appetite for bandwidth. Two or more fiber pairs per path seems to become the standard for these parties. So, building new systems to a key hub just seems the most logical thing to do, that is, today it seems logical. I also made a case regarding diversity and resiliency. A new path across the Atlantic between key hubs in Europe and the United States of America would be the best solution to hit two (maybe three) birds with one stone. Our dependency of the Internet makes it too important to leave it in a fragile state. Yes, there are many cables across the Atlantic and there has not been any major outages, yet. But our dependency requires us to do our utmost best to try and prevent such a scenario and come with solutions to stay ahead and provide for a secure Internet experience for end-users.