Via Silk Road Briefing, a look at China’s submarine digital fiber optic Belt and Road:

While a great deal of China’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure can be seen, with port developments, roads and railways being built, one of the more impressive, far-reaching and little noticed infrastructure builds is that China has become a leading submarine cable provider. Within the  “Made in China 2025” plan, China stated its plans to capture 60% of the global fiber optic market.

Subsea cables are the world’s information super-highways, carrying over 95 percent of international data. There are roughly 400 cables functioning worldwide of widely varying quality and capacity.3 They carry everything from streaming videos and telephone calls to transactions for credit cards, ATMs, and stock exchanges. Thanks to subsea cables, essential services from education to medical assistance can be delivered virtually, expanding access and improving affordability. All these applications depend upon the high-bandwidth connections that subsea cables provide.

China’s Undersea Projects

Chinese initial efforts to develop the Hong Kong-US undersea cable link began in 2009 when a joint venture between Huawei and Global Marine (UK) saw expanding Chinese involvement. In the following decade, Huawei Marine Networks completed more than 100 projects. China subsequently became the world’s fourth-largest supplier of undersea cables in 2019.

In 2020, Hengtong Group, China’s largest producer of advanced submarine-grade fiber,  purchased Huawei Marine Networks and renamed it “HMN Technologies.”

Growth in demand has been strongest on links connected to Asia, which grew by 53% annually between 2014 and 2018. Between 2015 and 2019, Asia’s international bandwidth grew by 42 percent annually. Hong Kong has been a major beneficiary of this growth, ranking sixth globally in international bandwidth in 2019. But transPacific cable planners are looking elsewhere after China imposed a sweeping national security law in June 2020. In the future, routes are more likely to land in Singapore, which is already the leading hub in Asia, as well as Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

The Hong Kong United States Undersea Cable Link

However, the planned Hong Kong-US undersea cable link has hit serious problems. Planned as a 6-fiber-pair of submarine cables connecting Hong Kong and the U.S. directly, with initial design capacity of 12.8 Tbps per fiber pair (for a total of 76.8 Tbps) using 100Gbps coherent DWDM technology, the HongKong-America (HKA) Consortium consisted of Facebook, China Telecom, China Unicom, RTI Express, Tata Communications and Telstra. The HKA supply contract was awarded to ASN, with the project announced in 2018. Facebook owned a significant amount of the cabling and was the landing party in the US. Last week however, Facebook decided to abandon the project and withdraw its US applications “due to ongoing concerns from the US government about direct communications links between the United States and Hong Kong.”

That has resulted in the cancellation of direct data connections between Hong Kong and Los Angeles, branches to Taiwan and Manchester, California, in addition to connections with the Philippines, which is now to be connected directly to the US rather than any Asian network.

According to Facebook, the HKA consortium is looking forward to working on the reconfiguration of the HKA cable system, to meet the concerns of the US government. Given the current political posturing of the United States and Chinese technologies, it is unlikely this will be rectified soon. It also damages Hong Kong’s intent to become an Asian Data Centre.

While the reaction of Beijing to this has still to be measured, China has been actively involved in building submarine cable connectivity elsewhere.

The Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe Link

HNM is involved in the Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) submarine cable project, which will connect China to Africa and Europe and is 15,000 km in length. It will reduce Pakistani internet traffic going through India

Running South from Pakistan to Kenya and the Seychelles with plans to land in South Africa, and then up north through the Mediterranean into France, the PEACE cable is 15,000km (9,320mi) long and capable of a transmitting capacity of 16Tbps per fiber pair. Development began in 2017 and aims to offer a low latency route from Asia into Africa & Europe, landing at Pakistan, Djibouti, Egypt, Kenya, and France. The cable is due to go live for commercial use in 2021.

The West Africa Cable System

The West Africa Cable System (WACS) links South Africa with the UK along the west coast of Africa. The cable consists of four fibre pairs and is 14,530 km in length, running from Yzerfontein in the Western Cape to London. It has 14 African landing points, including Namibia, Angola, DR Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cape Verde and the Canary Islands and 2 in Europe (Portugal and England). The total cost for the cable system is US$650 million, with the network already operational.

Several major state level initiatives support China’s push into submarine networks, with the Digital Silk Road to increase connectivity between China and more than 130 participating countries.

Other projects are underway and following the ‘Made in China 2025’ plan. In terms of ITC networks, that was identified as China having 50% of the international market for China domestic manufactured fiber optic communication equipment, with China manufactured routers and switches capturing 20% of the international market. Both were to be achieved by 2020.

By 2025, Chinese domestic fiber optic communication equipment should capture 60% of the international market. Of this, domestic routers and switches should capture 25% of the international market.