III. Overview of the Project
Applicants propose to construct a high capacity telecommunications system that would link major cities along the California coast from San Francisco to San Diego using both undersea and terrestrial fiber optic cable. The objective of the Project is to provide intrastate, interexchange high-capacity, or "large bandwidth," digital services to transmit voice, data, video, cable TV, internet traffic, and other forms of digital data. The Project will also provide high capacity transport that directly connects existing and planned trans-Pacific cables in the San Luis Obispo region with Monterey and San Francisco to the north, and Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego to the south. These trans-Pacific cables serve as an "International Gateway" connecting major cities on the west coast with Hawaii, Asia, Australia and South America.
The undersea portion of the cable would be buried along the California coastline, generally 3 to 12 miles offshore, and would come ashore at seven landing sites (San Francisco, La Selva Beach in Santa Cruz County, Sand City in Monterey County, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Manhattan Beach, and San Diego). At these landing sites, the sea cable would connect with terrestrial cable to directly link the cities of San Francisco, San Jose, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego. A portion of the undersea cable route lies within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (Sanctuary) from near San Francisco to just north of Estero Bay (near Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo). The Project also requires two landings in the Monterey area to bypass a deep submarine canyon. The cable would land north of this deep undersea canyon at La Selva Beach, bypass the submarine canyon on land, and return to sea south of the canyon near Sand City in Monterey.
The undersea cable is an unpowered, high capacity fiber optic cable that is just under one inch in diameter and transmits only light. The application states that because the cable is inert and does not transmit electricity, it has no electromagnetic interference interactions with other cables.3 The proposed terrestrial cable is standard fiber optic cable just under a half inch in diameter.4
According to the applicants, the Project is designed to alleviate congestion on the existing telecommunications network and allow for the expected future growth in traffic. At present, all north-south telecommunications traffic in California is carried on land-based cables. The applicants state that this offshore route is planned to provide route diversity and advance the theory an offshore route will offer added reliability to public communications in California's major cities in case of network disruption due to accident or natural disaster. However, since this is an uncontested proceeding we have not developed the record on this issue.
Applicants further state that they do not at this time seek approval of any construction not described in the EIR.
3 See Attachment A, pg. 2. 4 Ibid.
