Cayman Islands’ submarine cable system MAYA-1 partially down
From TeleGeography
Cayman Islands’ incumbent telco LIME Cayman Islands has announced that MAYA-1 cable system, which provides international bandwidth capacity to the island, has suffered a shunt fault on Segment Six, located between the system’s landing station at Half Moon Bay and Repeater One (Line Amplifier) in Cayman, with 34% of the country’s international circuits down as a result. According to a company’s press release, ‘the failure is preventing local power feeding units from reaching their operating output levels and forcing them into shutdown mode despite numerous attempts to restore them’. LIME is also working with the MAYA-1 Consortium to reconfigure the system in an attempt to power-feed the cable from Miami. The process will require a complete system outage and will be attempted at midnight on 30 July 2013. LIME also stated that the company tried to restore as much traffic as possible via the Cayman-Jamaica Fibre system, although subscribers may still encounter intermittent issues with international voice calls, broadband and roaming services.
According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, the Cayman Islands is served by two submarine cables; the 870km 
2.5Gbps Cayman-Jamaica Fibre system operated by Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) went live in 1997, connecting Cayman Brac and Half Moon Bay (Grand Cayman) with Kingston in Jamaica. In 2000 a second submarine cable system – MAYA-1 – went into operation, providing services to the United States, Mexico, Honduras, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia. The MAYA-1 cable is co-owned by CWC, Verizon Business, Tata Communications, AT&T, Sprint, Hondutel, CANTV, Telefonica, BT, Orbitel and MarcaTel.
For more on this story go to:
See also LIME press release on iNews Cayman “Cayman experiences major Internet outage” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/2013/07/cayman-experiences-major-internet-outage/
About the MAYA-1 Cable System
MAYA-1 is a Submarine Cable System providing service from Hollywood, Florida on the southern tip of the United States to Tolu, Colombia on the northern tip of South America. Utilizing Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) with Erbium-Doped-Fiber-Amplifier (EDFA) technology, MAYA-1 has a system capacity of 82.5 Gbps. It is a collapsed SDH ring system with semi-passive branching units and has a total length of 4400 km. It provides service to the United States, Mexico, Honduras, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia.
On December 19th 2012 Alcatel-Lucent announced they were to upgrade the MAYA-1 cable to “faster 40 gigabits-per-second speed and greater capacity”.
Paris, December 19, 2012 — Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is to upgrade the MAYA-1 submarine cable 
system – which spans 4,400km distance in a collapsed ring from Hollywood, Florida, US, to Tolu in Colombia – quadrupling the activated data capacity to address growing demand for bandwidth-intensive services, as well as position the Caribbean as a critical hub for communications between North and South America.
The 40 Gigabits per second (40G) subsea system will use the high scalability of Alcatel-Lucent’s market-leading single carrier coherent technology to lay the foundation for potential upgrade to 100G capabilities in the future.
Donnie Forbes, Chairman of the MAYA-1 Upgrade #4 Working Group said: “Investing in new capacity on the Maya-1 system will enable the system owners to address the persistent demand for capacity allowing us to satisfy current demand and giving the flexibility to upgrade the system in the future to 100G to keep pace with ever-growing capacity requirements.
Philippe Dumont, President, Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks, said: “The communication infrastructure in Central and Latin America must be able to cope with increased broadband access requirements and with secure content delivery. Our solution offers scalability for staged upgrades that meet significant bandwidth increments over time, while protecting investments in the subsea plant.”
About the Alcatel-Lucent solution
The solution that will be provided to MAYA-1 is based on the 1620 Light Manager submarine line terminal equipment, which uses single-carrier coherent technology to provide the most efficient use of the available optical spectrum. Designed to operate on different channel spacing grids, with various modulation formats and channel bit rates co-existing on the same platform, the flexibility of the 1620 LM ensures the highest achievable capacity in the most cost-effective manner. It will also feature built-in supervision function, allowing for managing the wet plant along with the management system.
