Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Facebook's subsea cable subsidary, Edge Cable Holdings, has petitioned the FCC to land a new cable at the NJIX data center in Wall Township, New Jersey. The cable lands in Europe at an Arelion owned facility in Blaabjerg, Denmark. META uses both NJIX and the Arelion facility for the power feed equipment, but is installing the submarine line termination equipment, which includes the lasers and electronics at a Piscataway carrier neutral data center and its Danish counterpart, an unnamed Esbjerg site. There are two huge data centers in Esbjerg. Facebook currently owns two fiber pairs on the consortium AEC-2 subset network linking the US and Denmark. AEC-2 has exactly the same end points as Aurora. Hyperscaler traffic has grown so rapidly that consortium membership in many cases simply makes no economic sense. Most hyperscalers need all the capacity that a cable provides and hence sole ownership as emerged as the most economic business model. We know very little about A...

Type of Cable System: Repeated Two-Core Fibre Pairs With Coherent Optics  Consortium Members: Independent Operator. Construction Status: Design and Fund Raising Stage.  Number of Fibre Pairs: 48.  Number of Cores Per Fibre: 2. Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2027. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 13 Pbps.  Salient Features: 48 Pair repeatered cable directly linking UK, Norway, Demark, Germany, and Netherlands. Every fibre optic path is direct and involves no third country transit. Each fibre pair strand has two optical cores instead of the standard one.  Supplier: NEC. Only NEC offers multicore fibre strands and 48 pair repeaters.  I interviewed today one of the project's founders, Eckhard Bruckshen. The IOEMA cable is designed to reduce the dependence of European telecommunications traffic on the Denmark bottleneck as the map below illustrates. Today Denmark is the primary telecom bridge between the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland (also the ...