The Marea Subsea Cable: A Pioneer Of The Open Cable Model And New TransAtlantic Routing
Technology: Standard 100G wave coherent optics. Shorter repeater spacings to maximize per fibre pair throughput. Fibre Pairs: 8. Founding Fathers: Facebook and Microsoft Consortium Members: Facebook, Microsoft, and Telxius. RFS: May, 2018. Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Spain. Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Bilbao, Spain. Notable Features: First cable to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Also first cable to adopt the open cable system model where each consortium member selects their own submarine line termination gear and owns either fibre pairs or spectrum. Potential Throughput: 224 Tbps. Marea is the first cable to give the cold shoulder to New York City and the UK. It directly links Ashburn Equinix via a Virginia Beach landing to Continental Europe with a Spanish landing. The cable completely bypasses the UK and the Northeastern US. This reflected Ashburn Equinix' rising importance and the desire of network planners to avo...