Wave Broadband said it has finished a 97-mile underground fiber line between its network of data centers in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro, Ore. and the Oregon Coast, speeding up data and increasing reliability for its customers while connecting them with top Asian markets.
The Nestucca Route connects the data centers with an undersea cable landing station in Pacific City, Ore. for undersea cables that traverse the Pacific Ocean. With this new underground line, Wave customers are now directly linked to markets in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan via the landing station, with more to come as a new cable scheduled to come online in October is completed. Underserved communities along the coast will be boosted by the fast, reliable connections to data centers in Hillsboro created by the new line.
“The completion of the Nestucca Route is not only a major milestone for our company, but it, along with the 101-mile Salmon Route, represents a truly unique solution for the submarine cables that land in Oregon,” said Greg Palser, Wave VP of Business Development. “These two fiber routes make up the only low-latency submarine cable backhaul constructed on the West Coast in the last 10 years. The Nestucca and Salmon routes will also provide businesses with crucial redundancy in case of route disruption or repair.”
Wave said several West Coast government, finance, and hospitality-based businesses are already taking advantage of the completed fiber route. Wave pointed to the Seattle-based National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative as an example of a prominent user. The organization uses Wave’s fiber infrastructure to transmit high volumes of ocean monitoring data and commands related to earthquake detection and underwater volcanism to researchers and educators across the globe using cabled instruments.
Kirkland, Wash.-based Wave has been steadily building out its fiber infrastructure for years, and the company says it has 7,500 miles of fiber lines along the West Coast in Washington, Oregon and California. Wave is in the middle of being acquired TPG Capital and combining with two other companies — RCN Telecom Services and Grande Communications Networks — to form the nation’s sixth largest internet and cable operator in a $2.36 billion deal.
