A Less Well Known High Capacity Atlantic Digital Highway: Amitié

Most Layer 1 bandwidth buyers focus their efforts on EXA's three Hibernia Atlantic cables, Aquacoms' AEC-1 and AEC-2 assets, and Marea and Dunant. As a group, those subsea networks probably account for 80% of wavelength transactions across the Pond.

Two lesser well known alternatives are Amitié and Grace Hopper. Amitié means friendship in French. Not surprisingly, it connects Boston via a Lynn, Massachusetts landing at a Hibernia CLS to Bordeaux, France. This spatial division multiplexing 16 fibre pair main trunk cable is a Meta project. Meta owns 80% of the network capacity with the balance held by the minority partners of Orange, Vodafone, and Aquacoms. To be more precise, Amitié branches in the Eastern Atlantic to the UK and France. Twelve fibre pairs land at Bude, Cornwall, and sixteen pairs at the Orange La Porge CLS, a short distance from Bordeaux. Note that 16 pairs land in the US, but a total of 28 on the European side. The branching unit is using optical switching to multiplex between the 16 American pairs and their 28 European counterparts. This has become standard practice as subsea cables increasingly bifurcate their trunks in the Atlantic and Pacific to reduce risk and latency. Total end-to-end design transmission throughput is 320 Tbps. If you are looking for capacity on this unique cable, go to Colt, EXA or Aquacomms. Note that the reason for a Boston landing is resiliency and lower latency. Network problems at the New York hubs are avoided by using Boston as an aggregation point for the US Northeast as well as Québec and Ontario. Furthermore, latency is minimized for the US and Canadian Northeast traffic.

Map of Amitié Fibre Optic Subsea Cable


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