The Most Important Subsea Cables Going Live In 2025: Anjana

Like Firmina Anjana uses the Myrtle Beach CLS (DC Blox is the owner) for its US landing and is an extremely high capacity spatial division multiplexing cable with 24 fibre pairs. Design throughput is 480 Tbps. It is also a hyperscaler cable, a Meta project. The European landing is at Santander, Spain with Telxius providing the CLS. The name Anjana is a mystery to me. I assumed it was a Spanish name, but Anjana is also an Asian Indian female name that means complete and worthy. 

Notable features include

***Record holder for highest capacity Trans-Atlantic cable at a half petabit day one. Note this is design capacity. It will undoubtedly be upgraded to even higher levels down the road. How much depends on coherent optics progress.

***Uses aluminum to conduct power. This works better than copper because it is lighter weight and less expensive. By using a slightly greater diameter aluminum can maintain the same voltage draw down as copper.

***Meta is landing the cable itself in US waters reflecting a growing tendency for Digital Giants to handle landings themselves in order to gain greater control and accountability. Third parties always have excuses. 😉

Anjana really represents a capstone for the Trans-Atlantic subsea cable industry. Private wholesale operators dominated the Atlantic from 1998 to the mid-teens of the 21st century when Microsoft's Marea went live. I believe it was Aquacoms that built the last wholly owned wholesale operator cable across the Atlantic. But it appears Aquacoms (financial results are not public so this is largely spectulation based on CEO turnover and the fact that the cable is part of an investment portfolio whose valuation was recently downgraded) has struggled to achieve satisfactory financial results for its investors. In addition, the last consortium cable, TAT-14, was decommissioned a few years back. So the era of wholesale operators has come to an end. I expect only hyperscalers will be building this route going forward. The simple fact is the Digital Giants dominate the traffic flows so it makes sense for them to do-it-themselves. This eliminates 90% of the wholesale capacity demand for connectivity between the US and Europe. Hence there is not enough demand for a wholesale player to build a cable system. Wholesale players like Telxius and others will simply buy spectrum or a fibre pair or two at most on hyperscaler cables or contribute in some other fashion for their capacity by landing the cable or hosting the CLS. This is our Brave New World. 

Right now Facebook is selling capacity on the system. I have received inquiries myself.