Amazon's New 420 Tbps Sta'O'Nuk Cable Linking Japan To The US

Amazon's core network business is cloud services. These services generate less network traffic over long distances than Google's web search and advertising busiess. Customers download their data, compute, and then retrieve it or store it there. Amazon may back up its customer's data in another data center in the same cloud region, but traffic flows from cloud region to cloud region are probably low. As a result, Amazon has been a follower in subsea cables. Often a silent or minority investor like in the Bifrost where it is getting lit capacity in exchange for providing the US landing station. In some cases, Amazon is not a consortium member, but a fibre pair customer. Amazon bought a fibre pair IRU on the Marea, which connects Virginia Beach to Spain, from Telxius. It was probably their first physical capacity ownership on a subsea cable. 

More recently, Amazon announced its first solar project, Fastnet, which connects Ireland, where it owns several large data centers, to Maryland. Last month Amazon announced the 420 Tbps Sta'O'Nuk cable connecting new virgin landing points in Japan and USA. It has 20 fibre pairs. So each fibre pair generates 20 Tbps. This makes it the highest capacity Trans-Pacific cable ever and dethrones the previous record holder, Juno, at 360 Tbps. What we know is limited. The landing points are new and so are the cable landing stations. What tidbit we have is that Amazon is landing the cable in the State of Washington. This is the first new able to do so in 30 years. Undoubtedly, the US backhaul will use a fully diverse fibre ring to the Westin building in Seattle. Westin is the premier Seattle telecom hotel.

Other notable features the use of bore pipes to connect the beach manholes to the subsea cable fibre offshore. These will be installed using horizontal directional drilling. And finally, subsea cable burial up to 1,500 meters. The classic hyperscaler theme that resiliency is the top priority is again confirmed in this project. Amazon did note it would be a 'low latency' cable. That could be quite interesting to financial traders and Mox Networks.

Amazon noted that is using multiple encryption layers from Layer 1 to Layer 3 for the traffic traversing this cable. Indeed, it is using quantum-safe optical encryption at Layer 1. 

For more details and a bit of fluff, I recommend

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/infrastructure-sustainability/staonuk-how-a-new-transpacific-subsea-cable-will-reshape-cloud-connectivity-between-north-america-and-japan/

Also Winston's solid summary: https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/staonuk/aws-announces-staonuk

Map of the New Fibre Optic Amazon Sta'O'Nuk Subsea Cable



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