The Best Subsea Trans-Atlantic Cable For General Bandwidth: Google's Dunant
Fibre Pairs: 12.
Dunant was the beginning of the spatial division multiplexing revolution. It was the first cable to leapfrog from the standard 4 to 8 fibre pair coherent optics paradigm for the Atlantic to the 12 to 32 pair spatial division multiplexing model that dominates today. Dunant went live January 19, 2021 with 12 fibre pairs and lit capacity of 250 terabits per second. However, the design capacity was even higher, 300 Tbps. The cable is named after the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant who founded the Red Cross and received the first Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
What makes Dunant special besides its immense capacity is the route itself. During my time at Hibernia Atlantic (2005-2011) most TransAltantic cables landed in the UK and connected 60 Hudson and 111 8th Avenue to Telehouse London. However, change was afoot. Equinix was building its Slough Equinix facility in London's suburbs and also the Secaucus Equinix campus in New Jersey's industrial wasteland on the West side of the Hudson river opposite Manhattan's Midtown bus station. So already telecom traffic and carriers were migrating out of each city and into the burbs.
More importantly, the Equinix Ashburn facility was rapidly expanding and soon became the single most important Internet traffic exchange hub in North America. On the European continent there was rapid data centre building and upgrades in Frankfurt, Paris, and Amsterdam with Amsterdam rivaling London in importance. The first shift was that traffic flows and circuit requests shifted from central London and Manhattan to Slough Equinix and Secaucus Equinix. Buyers began soon requesting 10G and 100G waves that bypassed central London and NYC all together but connected the New Jersey Equinix facility to its Slough counterpart.
But even more important was that Ashburn Equinix became so large that virtually all American ISPs and networks felt compelled to make it a POP (network point of presence). That data centre campus had achieved critical mass. It became viewed as essential. European Internet backbones saw that they only needed to be at Ashburn to do all their US-related peering effectively. Google and Microsoft realized that traffic flows between continental Europe and the US were best served by a landing on Continental Europe and a landing near Ashburn Equinix. And that avoiding the UK altogether was a virtue. Such cables would offer lower latency and sharply improve the resiliency of the Internet backbones including their own. In particular, it would reduce the reliance on subsea systems landing near NYC. The Marea cable went live in 2019. It is a standard low fibre pair count coherent optics cable connecting Spain to Ashburn Equinix via a Virginia Beach.
In contrast, Google's Dunant connects Ashburn Equinix to Paris, which is arguably a much better traffic distribution point for Western Europe than Marea's Spain landing since it is closer to Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Dunant's French landing is at Saint Hillaire de Riez. Virtually all carriers owning Dunant capacity will extend it to Paris at no extra cost for the client. Providers generally charge $5500 to $7500 a month per 100G wavelength on a 3 year contract to connect Ashburn Equinix via Dunant to the Paris Equinix facilities or the famous Telehouse 2 data center in the 11th district. Bypassing the UK which is notorious for its surveillance of Internet traffic and avoiding NYC with its history of terrorist attacks makes Dunant a must-have for any global IP network. Who are the key providers? Telxius and EXA Infrastructure. EXA just took a fibre pair and although Telxius is more secretive, it is a good guess that they have at least one pair as well. Likely there are other carriers owning spectrum and selling as wavelengths. Feel free to contact me for more details and definitive pricing.
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