Orange signed a partnership to co-invest in the Amitie cable system, which will link Massachusetts in the US to both the French Atlantic coast and the UK. The project, which is awaiting approval from local authorities in the US, will rely on Orange for the operation and maintenance of the landing station planned in Le Porge, near the city of Bordeaux, and for land links to other French interconnection hubs, including Paris.
The cable system, which could be ready for service in Q1 2022, will have a segment branching off to the Cornish town of Bude, on the southwest coast of the UK. Its main segment, connecting the Lynn cable landing station in Massachusetts to Europe, will have sixteen fibre pairs of up to 23 Tbps of capacity each. The consortium behind the project includes Facebook subsidiary Edge Cable Holdings, Microsoft, subsea cable specialist Aqua Comms, and Vodafone subsidiary CWAS (Cable & Wireless Americas Systems).
Coinciding with the announcement of this partnership, Orange also said that its wholesale and business customers can take advantage of improved international connectivity following the completion of the Dunant project, for which it collaborated with Google. This trans-Atlantic cable system has recently entered into service, after Orange completed the landing station on the French Atlantic coast in March 2020. At the time, the operator said that it would benefit from two fibre pairs, each with a capacity of more than 30 Tbps.
Similarly, two fibre pairs on the new Amitie cable will further strengthen Orange capacity, set to reach up to 100 Tbps across the Amitie and Dunant systems. This will support increased bandwidth needs, said the company, as internet traffic between North America and Europe doubles every two years on average, and over 80 percent of traffic generated in France comes from the US.
