The New Subsea Cable RFS 2025 Series: Airraq

Airraq is a new subsea cable connecting important Alaskan Coast communities. Not surprisingly, most remote, sparsely populated areas in the US are bandwidth famished. Because Alaska shares no border with the Continental US, subsea cables are used to connect it to the lower 48 US states with satellite and microwave back haul the usual Last Mile connectivity in remote cities and villages. Coastal cables like Airraq are used to aggregate traffic and then hand it off to the international cables that haul it down the British Columbia coast to Washington or Oregon. The coastal aggregation cables effectively eliminate the Middle and Last Mile congestion since most communities lie on the coast or next to inland rivers. 

This new cable is a 12 fibre pair, spatial division multiplexing system (SDM) landing in three locations and then using terrestrial arteries to reach cities and towns. Despite being SDM, the throughput levels are relatively low ranging from 1.6 Tbps to 3.2 Tbps, which is reasonable given the number of people being served. The US government's broadband program is giving the cable's owner, Unicom, $108 million to build it. Ironically, this is Republican political territory heavily benefiting from a generous Democratic administration. This is a pattern seen through the US. 




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