Ocean Specialists is proud to support all of our clients and we are happy to share their major milestones. The following article from the Submarine Cable World daily newsfeed of April 12, 2017 describes the Quintillion network and the granting of their FCC Landing License. Congratulations Quintillion!
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has granted a Cable Landing License to Quintillion Subsea Operations, LLC for the purpose of constructing, landing and operating a private fiber-optic submarine cable network, the Quintillion System, extending between Nome, Alaska and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The FCC also granted a Petition to Adopt Conditions to Authorizations and Licenses filed on March 27, 2017, by the Department of Homeland Security.
The Quintillion System will be deployed as a trunk and branch configuration and consist of eleven segments, with each segment designed to initially carry up to 100 wavelengths at 100 Gigabits per second (Gb/s). The Quintillion System, along with associated cable landing stations, will consist of the following:
- Segment 1 will connect Quintillion’s planned cable landing station at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the first Branching Unit (BU1), located off the coast of Alaska north of Oliktok Point, Alaska;
- Segment 2 will connect BU1 to Branching Unit 2 (BU2), located off the coast of Alaska northwest of Barrow, Alaska;
- Segment 3 will connect BU2 to Quintillion’s planned cable landing station at Barrow, Alaska;
- Segment 4 will connect BU2 to Branching Unit 3 (BU3), located off the coast of Alaska northwest of Wainwright, Alaska;
- Segment 5 will connect BU3 to Quintillion’s planned cable landing station at Wainwright, Alaska;
- Segment 6 will connect BU3 to Branching Unit 4 (BU4), located off the coast of Alaska southwest of Point Hope, Alaska;
- Segment 7 will connect BU4 to Quintillion’s planned cable landing station at Point Hope, Alaska;
- Segment 8 will connect BU4 to Branching Unit 5 (BU5), located off the coast of Alaska south of Point Hope and northwest of Kotzebue, Alaska;
- Segment 9 will connect BU5 to an existing cable landing station at Kotzebue, Alaska;
- Segment 10 will connect BU5 to Branching Unit 6 (BU6), located off the coast of Alaska west of Nome, Alaska;
- Segment 11 will connect BU6 to an existing cable landing station at Nome, Alaska
The Quintillion System is comprised of three fiber pairs and six cable landing station sites. Each fiber pair will have an initial capacity of 10 Terabits per second (Tbps), and two of the fiber pairs will be used to operate on each segment and provide redundancy between the six cable landing sites. The third fiber pair is reserved for future use in the near future to monitor and status and condition of certain fiber pairs. The Quintillion System will total 1,176 miles in length.
Quintillion will own and control all portions of the Quintillion System including the portion of the cable located in territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, U.S. territorial waters, and outside of the territory subject to U.S. jurisdiction. For cable landing station buildings, (1) Quintillion will enter into twenty year leases with Arctic Holdings, an Alaskan real estate developer, for cable landing stations located at Barrow, Point Hope, and Wainwright, Alaska (with the option to extend each lease for an additional five years on the same terms and conditions, and thereafter the option to renew such extensions three times for a potential 40 year term each), (2) Quintillion will own and operate the cable landing station located at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and the cable landing station building will be located on land leased by Conoco Phillips from the State of Alaska, and (3) Quintillion will lease spaces for collocation of the Kotzebue and Nome cable landing station equipment within Central Office buildings owned by OTZ Telephone Cooperative and TelAlaska. Certain operations of the landing stations may be performed under Quintillion’s control through a third-party Network Operations Center (NOC) service network.
