Uniterreno Subsea Cable RFS Today

The 24 fibre pair repeatered cable links Genoa, Rome, Sardinia, and Sicily. It is very high capacity. Each fibre pair can transmit slightly in excess of 26 terabits per second for a grand total of over 624 Tbps. This is likely the highest transmission rate of any repeatered subsea cable to date. Uniterreno is constructing a Rome data center to which the cable will be connected. Unidata is the name of the data center division. 

The cable illustrates a number of subsea communication trends. The 24 fibre pair count has become the de facto standard. When I worked at Hibernia Atlantic between 2005 and 2011, cables never exceeded 8 pairs. That was the technical and economic ceiling. In contrast, Facebook's Waterworth, Uniterreno, Anjana, Candle, and Medusa are all 24 pair systems. So half petabit repeatered cables are the new normal.

Uniterreno also illustrates a recent trend to build very high subsea capacity cables that serve a single nation. High capacity single nation cables are quite common in Southeast Asia. In Uniterreno's case it offers physical diversity to the terrestrial routes connecting Rome to Northern Italy. Another advantage is that traffic from Sicily to Northern Italy enjoys a latency edge over the less-than-straight terrestrial paths up the Boot. To some extent the project is a bet that intercontinental cables connecting Asia, India, and the Middle East will land in Sicily because Uniterreno can cost effectively backhaul the traffic to Rome and Milano as well as the other important Northern Italian cities. 

Another important trend in our industry is the open cable business model. Infrastructure companies, tech giants, consortiums or private operators create a cable and then sell capacity in the form of fibre pairs and spectrum IRUs to interested carriers. The cables use carrier neutral POPs as the termination points as opposed to the traditional cable landing station. Each capacity buyer or consortium member selects their own subsea line termination equipment including the transponders and DWDM. The infrastructure company manages the wet segment and power feed equipment on land. In most cases it keeps (Google for example) some fibre pairs for its own internal traffic or to wholesale as lit capacity in the form of 100G and 400G waves. Uniterreno fits into that category. Its focus are sales of fibre pairs and spectrum. Undoubtedly, the company will keep some pairs, light them, and provide connectivity into its Rome data center. 

I believe the Rome data center plays a key role in the project. It can access and host data from all regions of Italy using low latency, massive bandwidth links. The appeal will include data sovereignty. Moreover, Rome is attractive to those wishing to diversify their data storage and hosting away from Milano, Italy's main telecom and data center hub. Uniterreno also offers terrestrial fibre optic networks new protect paths as traffic can be routed around trouble spots on land such as earthquakes and other disasters.

https://siliconcanals.com/unitirreno-launches-worlds-first-24-fiber-pair-repeatered-subsea-cable-transforming-mediterranean-connectivity/