Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Facebook is building a six fibre pair cable directly connecting Taiwan to the the United States with landings at Toucheng, Taiwan, Hermosa Beach, California, and Manchester, California. RFS is 2Q2027. The Hermosa Beach CLS is the well known facility built by RTI Holdings before its bankruptcy. In the submarine cable landing license application, Facebook noted that its motivation was the fact that US-Taiwanese traffic is growing rapidly each year. Due to the 12,000 kilometer length of the cable and the absence of any island landings for power, the design throughput per pair is a relatively low 12.8 Tbps or 76.8 Tbps aggregate initial capacity.  ORCA is an open cable so each fibre pair owner will operate and control its own submarine line terminating equipment with only power being under collective control. Since Facebook is the cable's sole initial owner, the open architecture suggests it will sell capacity on the system to third parties to recoup capital expenditures and share comm...

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 ...

Meta's Anjana cable sets an Atlantic bandwidth record with 24 fibre pairs each transmitting 20 terabits per second for a total of nearly a half petabit. This huge capacity reflects its spatial division multiplexing (SDM) design. Traditional subsea cable designs maximize capacity per pair, but this leads to nonlinear signal distortions once a threshold is exceeded. Hence additional power to boost the rate above the threshold yields only small gains. This inefficient use of power limits fiber pair counts to 8 or less per cable with most cables rarely exceeding 150 Tbps. In contast, SDM increases the total bandwidth punch by operating each pair at lower transmission rates to avoid these nonlinear signal distortions. In turn, the lower transmission rates free up power to support enough more pairs to sharply raise total cable throughput, which ranges from 200 Tbps to a half petabit per second.  Another notable feature of Anjana is that it lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Santa...