PLCN (Pacific Light Cable Network) was originally touted as the world's first undersea internet cable that connects Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines and the U.S..
Managed by the Pacific Light Data Communication Co., Ltd. (PLDC), which was founded in October 2015 in Hong Kong, PLCN is directly connecting Hong Kong and Los Angeles in the U.S., by including the C+L technology.
Its with this deployment of C+L band that PLCN could almost double the per fiber pair capacity to provide high-speed, low latency and more secure bandwidth to all internet users.
The fiber optic cable network boasts 6 fiber pairs, with 240 channels of 100Gbps in a single fiber pair (100G * 240 WL), 24 Tbps per fiber pair and 144Tbps for the whole system. With a lengthy 12,800km of cabling, PLCN has an estimated capacity of 120TB per second.
This makes it one of the highest capacity undersea cables in the trans-Pacific route.
The PLCN cable system is project by PLDC, as well as Google and Facebook.
Google owns one fiber pair in PLCN, which connects Hong Kong and the U.S. with a branch to Toucheng, Taiwan. With its fiber pair, Google acts as the landing party for the U.S. and Taiwan. In the U.S., Google lands the PLCN cable at Equinix LA4 data center where it houses the PFE and SLTEs of the whole PLCN cable system in the U.S. territory.
Facebook on the other hand, also owns one fiber pair in PLCN, which connects Hong Kong and the U.S., with two branches that go to the Philippines, to then land at Baler, Aurora and San Fernando, La Union respectively. The Baler and San Fernando cable landing stations are owned by the Philippine state-owned firm Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA).
Lastly, PLDC owns the remaining four pairs.
The company acts as the landing party in Hong Kong. PLDC lands the four pairs of cables it owns at Deep Water Bay CLS in Hong Kong, and installs its SLTEs at TMH, Telecom House data center in downtown, Wanchai, Hong Kong.
Designed with Open Cable structure, the three companies (Google, Facebook and PLDC) can operate their own PLCN fiber pair(s) independently.
