Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Facebook is deploying the first deep sea 1 Petabit per second fibre optic cable with two optical cores per fibre strand. A core is the optical transmission path in a fiber strand. Standard fiber has one core. The cable will connect North America to Europe and will land in Virginia Beach, and in Bordeaux, France (where the Amitié cable also comes ashore). So it will effectively link Ashburn Equinix to Paris. It is likely Facebook will use the existing cable landing stations serving Marea and Dunant at Virginia Beach. Similarly, in Bordeaux the 1 petabit cable is likely to use the Amitié CLS. Today the highest capacity communication cable in service across the Atlantic or any ocean for that matter is the half petabit Anjana, another META project. It has 24 fibre pairs operating at 20 Tbps per pair. Shannon's law tells us that a fibre pair operating at 20 Tbps is pretty close to full spectral efficiency.  Hence boosting per pair output is a dead end if the goal is to rai...

The new sport in Japan is breaking long haul fibre optic transmission records. NEC and the Japanese government agency, the National Institute of Communication Technology (NICT), announce new throughput records every 6 to 8 months. It is a major area of research. At the SubOptic 2025 conference NEC representatives did many presentations on their multicore research. NICT has taken a slightly different approach of combining multiple spectrum bands (C+L) with multicore fibre. This is more challenging because there are few C+L amplifier products on the market. In fact, only Subcom has manufactured and deployed such a system on the PLCN cable. Japan by the way has been a hub of innovation in optical networking and other high tech areas like space exploration. However, long term economic prospects are poor due to population decline and the low status of women which means their talents are underutilized.  What is special about this record breaking effort is the use of a 19 core fibre stran...