Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

This new 6 fiber pair cable directly connects Taiwan and the United States. It is a relatively low capacity system clocking 12.8 Tbps per pair or 76.8 Tbps in total. It is unusual in our era for new cables not to have at least 12 to 24 pairs. In that sense the cable is a throw back to the age of low fibre pair count coherent optical networks as opposed to the current spatial division multiplexing model. Most likely META'S forecast traffic is insufficient to justify a bigger count as Taiwan is a niche market of only 23 million people. While its economic significance is hard to exaggerate as the world's leading supplier of semiconductor chips, population still determines the size of traffic flows. It would not be surprising given the cable's transmission capacity that META keeps 100% of it.  META subsidiaries land and hold the cable landing licenses on both side of the Pacific. This illustrates the hyperscaler tendency towards complete vertical integration in order to speed ...