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TE SubCom, a submarine cable technology provider, has been selected to supply the North Atlantic Hafvrue cable system, which will connect mainland Northern Europe to the United States – the first system to do so in almost 20 years.

Owned and operated by a consortium of parties including Aqua Comms, Bulk Infrastructure, and Facebook, Hafvrue is comprised of a trunk cable that connects New Jersey, US to the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark with a branch landing in County Mayo, Ireland.

Djibouti Telecom and its partners have announced that the supply contract for the Djibouti Africa Regional Express (DARE) submarine cable system has come into force, with TE SubCom as the supplier.

Due for completion by May 2017, the DARE submarine cable system will improve communications along the east coast and Horn of Africa. The 5,400km cable system will provide a high-capacity route connecting Djibouti to Mombasa in Kenya, with branches to three major coastal cities in Somalia (Mogadishu, Berbera, and Bosaso), and an optional branch to Tanzania.

Finisar has been awarded $390 million from Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund, which will enable the components manufacturer to dramatically increase its R&D spending and high-volume production of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs).

Apple uses VCSELs in its new iPhone X to scan your face for its Face ID facial recognition system, and for proximity sensing in its AirPod earbuds. The 3D laser scanning system uses time-of-flight measurements to calculate the distance from the source to the target and back to the sensor.

BT has announced a £20 million investment to accelerate the expansion of its ultrafast broadband network to towns across Northern Ireland, reaching a further 140,000 premises.

The roll-out, which is scheduled to be completed by March 2019, will predominantly involve the deployment of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology, the operator said.

Under current programmes, 25 per cent of homes and businesses in Northern Ireland are scheduled to have access to ultrafast broadband, defined as speeds of 100Mb/s and above, by this time.

A consortium of six prominent telecom and content service providers – Amazon, Facebook, PLDT, NTT Communications, PCCW Global, and SoftBank – have signed an agreement to build a new transpacific submarine cable system connecting Japan, the Philippines and the United States.

Undersea communications specialist TE SubCom, a subsidiary of TE Connectivity, has been awarded the supply contract to build the system.

Multinational service provider BT has deepened its relationship with optical transport supplier Ciena, by renewing a five-year contract to deploy the vendor’s 6500 converged packet optical platform.

Ciena has been a supplier to BT since 2005 when it became one of the preferred suppliers to the operator’s 21CN deployment, the mega-project to migrate BT’s entire customer base from the existing UK public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to an Internet Protocol (IP)-based network.

Coriant announced that INEX, the Internet peering point for Ireland, has deployed the Groove G30 Network Disaggregation Platform in its backbone network, including 100G interconnect services, to optimise its network as internet exchange traffic continues to grow.

Founded in 1996, INEX serves more than 118 members from points of presence in six data centres in the Dublin region and a regional Internet exchange in Cork, which opened last year. INEX currently has more than one terabit of connected capacity and about 300 petabytes of traffic flowed over the exchange in 2016.

Adtran has announced that US operator CenturyLink is using its virtualised optical line terminal (OLT) in a field trial of next-generation access services.

This is the first US deployment of a disaggregated software-defined access (SD-Access) system, the vendor claims. The virtualised OLT can be programmed to deliver different technologies – in this case XGS-PON and NG-PON2 – from the same hardware, creating a more flexible, manageable and scalable access network infrastructure.

BT has made an offer to the UK government to voluntarily provide high-speed broadband to 99 per cent all homes and businesses across the country within five years, which would largely be delivered by Openreach.

The government said it received the offer after it committed to introduce a Universal Service Obligation (USO) through regulation to give every home and business in the UK the right to request a high-speed connection of at least 10Mb/s.

Global carrier GTT Communications has been selected by Jisc, the provider of digital services for the UK research and education community, to provide high-speed internet transit for the Janet network.

One of the leading national research and education networks in the world, Janet supports the innovation, research and learning of approximately 18 million UK college and university users. The Janet network is also the operator in the UK for eduroam, the international wireless roaming service for the education community that supports more than 70 million users around the world.