Anjana: The Atlantic's New Leviathan

Meta's Anjana cable sets an Atlantic bandwidth record with 24 fibre pairs each transmitting 20 terabits per second for a total of nearly a half petabit. This huge capacity reflects its spatial division multiplexing (SDM) design. Traditional subsea cable designs maximize capacity per pair, but this leads to nonlinear signal distortions once a threshold is exceeded. Hence additional power to boost the rate above the threshold yields only small gains. This inefficient use of power limits fiber pair counts to 8 or less per cable with most cables rarely exceeding 150 Tbps. In contast, SDM increases the total bandwidth punch by operating each pair at lower transmission rates to avoid these nonlinear signal distortions. In turn, the lower transmission rates free up power to support enough more pairs to sharply raise total cable throughput, which ranges from 200 Tbps to a half petabit per second. 

Another notable feature of Anjana is that it lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Santander, Spain. In 2000 almost all Atlantic cables directly connected London and New York City via landings near NYC and on Cornwall's coast. From London European-bound traffic would traverse English Channel cables to reach the Continent. But between 2008 and 2015 Internet peering migrated from the space limited Manhattan data centers to the huge, highly scalable Ashburn Equinix campus in Northern Virginia. Ashburn Equinix became quickly not only the East Coast's central Internet traffic exchange hub, but also one of the world's largest. Not surprisingly, the hyperscalers landed their first Atlantic cables, Marea and Dunant, at Virginia Beach near Ashburn. New York was demoted. Marea and Dunant also bypassed the UK with Spanish and French landings to improve resiliency, lower latency, and avoid British surveillance and tapping (2016 Snooper Law). The UK was also demoted. 

Anjana takes this resiliency through physical diversity strategy a step farther by landing in South Carolina. The Myrtle Beach CLS and beach manhole are shown below on the map. Facebook and the other Digital Giants care more about up time than do the telecommunications carriers themselves because lost due to poor Internet performance is greater. Carrier just provide SLA credits with clear upper bounds whereas there is no upper bound for Amazon if it is down on the Net. So they are constantly looking for new landings for their cables. From Myrtle Beach Facebook can connect to the major Atlanta telecom hubs serving the Southeastern United States and also send traffic to the South American cables landing in Miami as well as up to Ashburn Equinix. In Europe Anjana follows a similar pattern. It lands on Spain's Northern Coast at the new Telxius Santander CLS. Despite its name, the Telxius CLS is really just a power station for the subsea repeaters. Anjana's DWDM electronics are at Arasur Merlin Edge data center, a 100 megawatt facility. Cable landing stations have also been demoted in this brave new world. A Spanish carrier has built a 160 fibre pair ring between the CLS and the Arasur data center. The Northern Spain landing enables Facebook to quickly deliver traffic to Southern Europe and also to the three key international subsea cable gateways of Marseille, Genoa, and Lisbon, where the traffic can hitch a ride to Africa, the Middle East, India, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. 

Meta has left the door open for system capacity sales to recoup some of its capex. I expect Telxius to be a fibre pair buyer or get some wavelengths or spectrum as part of the CLS deal. EXA is also a likely candidate for a fibre pair or spectrum IRU. The two carriers are the Atlantic's main subsea wholesale capacity providers. Anjana will be RFS this year.