Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

MRC: $19,200. Term: 2 Years. Lisbon/London backhaul route protected. 

1. The submarine line termination equipment, consisting of active electronics and transponders (lasers and optical receivers), was traditionally kept at the cable landing station. This began changing when carriers wanted to own and manage their own dedicated capacity (fibre pair or spectrum slice). Telekom Malaysia was an early example. It took two fibre pairs on the ASE cable as opposed to a fraction of the consortium lit capacity. Later the hyperscalers crystallized this evolution in the open cable model which limits common ownership to the wet segments. Each owner has either fibre pairs or spectrum and makes its own decisions concerning where to place the SLTEs. Because cable landing stations are not designed as large carrier neutral interconnection points, the SLTEs are almost always housed in a cage at a carrier netural data center. It is this flexibility in choice of location and equipment vendor that makes the open cable model so appealing. It also facilitates hyperscalers build...

This is my first trip outside the Schengen Zone in 2.5 years. I intend to stay in Nairobi as my base of operations with trips to Singapore, India, Pakistan, Dubai, Oman, South Africa, and Nigeria this autumn. 

The FEC (forward error correction) encoder takes the bit stream and modifies it so the FEC decoder can detect and correct bit errors due to optical or electronic noise. To accomplish this, FEC adds extra redundant bits to the overhead that the decoder can use to identify and fix bit errors. The redundant bits are a mathematical function of the data payload values. This scheme enables transmission to keep bit errors very low without retransmission of the payload. It is similar in philosophy to the checksum field in IPV4. The difference is that the IPV4 field is strictly limited to detecting overhead errors and the routers respond to checksum failure by dropping the packet and forcing retransmission. In contrast, FEC is designed to detect and fix payload errors without retransmission.  The next interesting step is the bit to symbol conversion. Coherent optics represents bit patterns using combinations of optical properties like phase, amplitude, and polarization (there are two modes)...

And I have the solution to your Lagos metro network nightmare. Competitively priced and protected 100G waves using a unique right of way largely immune from civil and private construction harm.

Facebook is deploying the first deep sea 1 Petabit per second fibre optic cable with two optical cores per fibre strand. A core is the optical transmission path in a fiber strand. Standard fiber has one core. The cable will connect North America to Europe and will land in Virginia Beach, and in Bordeaux, France (where the Amitié cable also comes ashore). So it will effectively link Ashburn Equinix to Paris. It is likely Facebook will use the existing cable landing stations serving Marea and Dunant at Virginia Beach. Similarly, in Bordeaux the 1 petabit cable is likely to use the Amitié CLS. Today the highest capacity communication cable in service across the Atlantic or any ocean for that matter is the half petabit Anjana, another META project. It has 24 fibre pairs operating at 20 Tbps per pair. Shannon's law tells us that a fibre pair operating at 20 Tbps is pretty close to full spectral efficiency.  Hence boosting per pair output is a dead end if the goal is to rai...