Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

At the beginning of the third millennium almost all Trans-Atlantic cables directly linked the US or Canada to either Ireland or the UK. Flag North landed at Northport, New York, and Bude, UK. Hibernia North (EXA North) was a rare exception. It came ashore at Halifax and also in Southport, UK. Yellow touched ground on Long Island and at Bude. AC2 came ashore also at Brookhaven and Bude. Hibernia South (EXA South) landed in Halifax and also at Dublin. Finally, Apollo North touched ground at Brookhaven and Bude. Clearly this is inadequate physical diversity in terms of landing points and cable landing stations. It is highly cost effective because subsea cables can share common terrestrial infrastructure, but cost and resiliency are sworn enemies. There is almost always a tradeoff. Almost all Trans-Atlantic traffic went to the 9th floor Telx facility at 60 Hudson and the 111 8th Avenue data centre in Manhattan. In London the destination was almost invariably the Telehouse North and East da...

Technology: Spatial division multiplexing.  Fibre Pairs: 12.  Founding Father: Google Consortium Members: Google & Orange. The French PTT is best described as a junior partner.  RFS: January, 2021.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Paris. Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Saint-Hillaire-de-Riez.  Notable Features: Second cable after Marea to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Dunant was first subsea network  in the world to deploy spatial division multiplexing and and achieve a two digit fibre pair count.  Dunant was the beginning of the spatial division multiplexing revolution. It was the first cable to leapfrog from the standard 4 to 8 fibre pair coherent optics paradigm for the Atlantic to the 12 to 32 pair spatial division multiplexing model that dominates today. Dunant went live January 19, 2021 with 12 fibre pairs and lit capacity of 250 terabits per second. However, the design capacity was even higher, 300 Tbps. The cable is named after t...