Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Like Firmina Anjana uses the Myrtle Beach CLS (DC Blox is the owner) for its US landing and is an extremely high capacity spatial division multiplexing cable with 24 fibre pairs. Design throughput is 480 Tbps. It is also a hyperscaler cable, a Meta project. The European landing is at Santander, Spain with Telxius providing the CLS. The name Anjana is a mystery to me. I assumed it was a Spanish name, but Anjana is also an Asian Indian female name that means complete and worthy.  Notable features include ***Record holder for highest capacity Trans-Atlantic cable at a half petabit day one. Note this is design capacity. It will undoubtedly be upgraded to even higher levels down the road. How much depends on coherent optics progress. ***Uses aluminum to conduct power. This works better than copper because it is lighter weight and less expensive. By using a slightly greater diameter aluminum can maintain the same voltage draw down as copper. ***Meta is landing the cable itself in US wate...

It is important to keep in mind that the Facebook's W cable design is not finished. But reliable sources suggest it will originate at a Georgia or South Carolina CLS and first land in Nigeria. From there the cable will go to South Africa with a POP probably at the Cape Town Terraco campus. Then it sails for Kenya and up from Kenya to Oman before landing at Mumbai. Oman is becoming an important telecom hub with Ooredoo hosting the 2Africa CLS and lower connectivity costs than the UAE. I would not be surprised if Ooredoo also hosts W as well. By the way, branching units may be a better way to incorporate more countries into this cable network. Yes, my hands are not steady. I got Cs in Art in high school. 😀

Several sources have whispered in my ear that META is planning a new 16 fibre pair cable that will encompass the world going from the US East Coast to the US West Coast via the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The most ambitious subsea project ever undertaken. I do not know the exact routing. I know that the cable will launch from the American East Coast and will go down the West African Coast to South Africa and then head straight to Mumbai. It is not clear if Europe will be online or not. From Mumbai it will head straight to Australia and then up to the US West Coast. I speculate that there may be branching units to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But the basic routing is US/South Africa/India/Australia/US. What is not clear is if there will be branching units to add more countries to the cable.  This semi-secret cable reflects META's desire for network resiliency given the four month Red Sea down time that AAE-1 and other subsea cables suffered during the first half ...