Zayo's High Capacity English Channel Subsea Fibre Optic Cable: Zeus

The American carrier Zayo has an extensive European wide area network as well as a highly ranked international Internet backbone. Its relatively new subsea Zeus cable links Amsterdam to London via a double armored 96 fibre pair system buried on average between 2 and 3 meters deep. Although Zayo's press releases nowhere states it, any 96 fibre pair cable is undoubtedly unrepeatered just like Scylla and CrossChannel because a repeatered system would probably require more power than possible. Repeatered 96 pair cables do not exist. And like Scylla, Zeus uses ultra-low loss fibre. Probably the Corning SMF28 product. The cable's current throughput is 2.6 petabits per second with the potential to do up to 4 petabits. 

One reason both Scylla and Zeus are buried so deep is that the North Sea sediment layers off the  Netherland's coasts are not stable. They move carried by the North Sea's strong wind and sea currents. This necessitates deeper burial to ensure the cable does not become exposed and remains adequately protected. The three most recently deployed English Channel subsea cables are all 96 fibre pair count, unrepeatered systems using ultra-low loss glass. As Mark Tinka, former head of Seacom engineering, and now head of a Lagos metro network, pointed out to me, this development reflects improvements in signal processing for coherent optics. Digital signal processing means that optical distortions caused by chromatic dispersion are corrected by the digital processing core of the terminal gear. It is possible to estimate the degree of distortion and thereby infer the original pristine signal. These DSP wafers measured 40 nanometers in 2010 and only 3 today. So a huge leap in processing power makes possible these multi-petabit cable systems. 

Zeus is an unrepeatered 96 pair subsea cable linking London and Amsterdam





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