Goggle's New TransAtlantic SOL Cable: The March South

Google's SOL cable is the first Trans-Atlantic network to connect Florida to Europe with a landing at the Telxius Santander CLS on the Northern Spanish coast. The other cable, Nuvem, announced some time ago, will link the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina CLS owned and operated by DC BLOX to a landing near Lisbon. Details are sparse regarding SOL, but it will probably be similar in performance and design to the 16 fibre pair Nuvem cable that clocks 384 Tbps. The Florida landing is in the Palm Coast area between Jacksonville and Orlando.

An interesting feature is that both cables do island hopping. Both cables land in Bermuda and Azores (where a US Air Force base is located). Island hopping serves three goals. The first is power to offset voltage drop. Intermediate power feeding en route improves throughput. The more often a cable can feed, the higher the bandwidth. The other factor is optical amplifier noise. Amplification introduces noise which accumulates from amplifier to amplifier. By bringing the signal ashore to a CLS or data center it can be regenerated using electronics that filter out the noise using forward error correction and other digital processing techniques. The third goal is resiliency. If a segment of either SOL or Nuvem goes down, traffic can be rerouted via the islands to the other cable. If all segments of either SOL or Nuvem goes dark, Google has fibre connecting the landing stations on each side of the Atlantic.

Google is a public company eager to secure public good will. Bermuda gets a massive Internet infrastructure upgrade. Azores offers similar good will benefits. And of course, the US military will probably be interested in a fibre pair for its NATO mission.

The joint design is reminiscent of the old dual cable layouts like Hibernia North and South or the Flag Atlantic cables. Two cables would be deployed to serve the same end points or geographic regions. They would be physically diverse forming a classic ring architecture. Usually they would have a terrestrial connection so that wavelengths could be manually rerouted to the other cable in case of an outage.

I have noted in my previous posts that the American Tech Giants are moving their landings further South down the US East Coast to achieve greater resiliency. Around the year 2000 most cables landed in New York or New Jersey. Then Google and Microsoft landed Dunant and Marea at Virginia Beach. Subsequently, Anjana, Firmina, and Nuvem are landing in South Carolina. Now we are seeing the inevitable conclusion with SOL landing on the West Florida Coast. The March South reduces the average latency of Atlantic traffic by distributing traffic.

It would be very surprising if Telxius did not take capacity on SOL due to its focus on South and Latin America. Cable manufacturing is in the States so this is likely to be a Subcom project. Nuvem means cloud and Sol means sun.

Map Of The New Fibre Optic Subsea SOL Cable


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