Edge Cable, a fully-owned subsidiary of Facebook, quietly purchased a vacant lot in the unincorporated community of Tierra del Mar (TDM) Oregon in October 2018. About a month later the residents suddenly learned about its proposal to install a high-speed fiber-optic cable system (the Jupiter cable project) capable of providing a large capacity direct link between the U.S. and Japan and the Philippines. The cable would “land” at the vacant lot in TDM. But the submarine cable would require a half mile of hydraulic drilling, five miles of seafloor trenching and laying cable across the Pacific Ocean, which requires the stationing of massive equipment at the landing site. This includes machinery (such as a huge mud-recycling unit) on the tiny residential lot, necessary to complete the horizontal directional drilling (HDD) for the cable, better known as fracking. This means, in practice, up to six months of continuous, very loud, drilling, with industrial machinery less than fifty feet from existing homes, and more “if contingency measures are required” – in other words, if there is a frac-out.

NTT Ltd. will commence the construction of a "MIST" large-capacity submarine cable between Singapore, Myanmar and India (Mumbai and Chennai). The construction will be part of a strategic joint venture for international submarine cables in South East Asia, with Orient Link Pte. Ltd. from December 2019.

Aware of the increasing need for a more efficient and low latency route, Angola Cables has been exploring a new express route connecting the southern hemisphere subsea cables from Asia directly to South America via Africa. Proof of Concept (PoC) testing is currently being conducted leveraging two cable systems; the South Africa Far East cable system (SAFE), connecting Malaysia to Angola, and South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) connecting Angola to Brazil.

In the Submarine Cable Outage Reporting Order (Order), the Commission mandated reporting obligations for certain disruptions of submarine cable communications. The Commission uses outage reporting primarily to aid government-wide incident response, public safety and national security efforts, and the analysis of network reliability trends.  Two associations representing submarine cable providers, the North American Submarine Cable Association (NASCA) and the Submarine Cable Coalition (SCC), separately petitioned the Commission to reconsider certain aspects of the Order.