In what seems like just a flash, BSCC has six months in operational service behind it. Only fifteen months ago President Tommy Remengesau Jr turned the first sod for our future cable landing station at Ngeremlengui (CAP-N).

Now we are building on that achievement. The CAP-A project has well and truly launched, with a major Invitation for Tenders (link) in the market for supply and construction of the 37km ducted fibre between CAP-N and CAP-A. The additional connection point at Airai will significantly improve the robustness and throughput of BSCCnet connections to Retail Service Providers.

Operational resilience in Palau has been tested through a baptism of fire, with an unscheduled outage on 23rd May. Thanks to the satellite back-up maintained by PNCC and Palau Telecoms, the four and a half hours without service on BSCCnet did not cause too much damage, and demonstrated that the handover to 100% satellite capacity worked smoothly. Full credit is due to our Retail Service Providers, who managed this service outage so capably.

For the first time, Operational Performance Indicators (link) are published on the BSCC web site. In the submarine cable world, unfailing reliability is our standard. After all, who wants to try to repair equipment that is on the sea floor, thousands of metres down? BSCCnet’s loss of service of 4 hours and forty-one minutes is not much, when you consider there have been thousands of hours of uninterrupted service before that. But it is significant against the benchmarks we measure. Up to 23rd May we had lifetime availability of 100%. On the 24th it was 99.95%. We call that “three nines”. You may have heard of the legendary “five nines” in the quality control context. If we have no more outages until 2022, we will have made it to “four nines”. By 2025, with 100% availability the whole time, we will be at “five nines” – if we are allowed to round up! We will update operational measures each month from now on.