Fault brings month-long outage for PPC-1 international cable

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news A fault discovered on the 6,900km PPC-1 submarine cable connecting Australia to Guam is likely to take around 30 days to repair, according to TPG Telecom.

The company became aware of the issue at around 8pm AEDT on 5 February, when the TPG Network Operations Centre received multiple alarms for the telecommunications cable system.

“The alarms indicated that a submarine line card had lost its payload. A Network Incident ticket was created and the issue was immediately escalated to the PPC-1 transmission engineering team,” TPG said in a statement.

Following preliminary investigations, the transmission engineering team, in collaboration with partners, found a fibre fault approximately 4,590 kilometres away from Guam.

The nature of the fault means a complete outage for the entire PPC-1 cable system until it can be repaired, the firm said.

“Due to the nature of the fault, resolution is expected to take an extended period,” it added, providing a provisional date of 7 March for the return of services.

TPG stressed that it has international IP network resilience in place via other submarine cable systems, including Southern Cross and the Australian Japan Cable system.

TPG has already started to work with its maintenance contractor with the intention of moving a repair ship to the fault site.

PPC-1 is an ultra-long haul cable system designed and built by Tyco Electronics Subsea Communications and used for .

It comprises four fibre pairs – two of which run between Sydney and Guam – and utilises ‘dispersion-flattening’ technology to minimise the use of compensation fibres in the cable stations.

TPG’s website says this allows PPC-1 to be repaired “easily and quickly” as well as being capable of running 40 Gbps wavelengths, with up to 100 Gbps wavelengths also being technically possible.

The cable is currently equipped to run with 10 Gbps wavelengths and is capable of carrying 2.56 Tbps.

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