Introductory Schematic of Subsea Cable Architecture
1. The submarine line termination equipment, consisting of active electronics and transponders (lasers and optical receivers), was traditionally kept at the cable landing station. This began changing when carriers wanted to own and manage their own dedicated capacity (fibre pair or spectrum slice). Telekom Malaysia was an early example. It took two fibre pairs on the ASE cable as opposed to a fraction of the consortium lit capacity. Later the hyperscalers crystallized this evolution in the open cable model which limits common ownership to the wet segments. Each owner has either fibre pairs or spectrum and makes its own decisions concerning where to place the SLTEs. Because cable landing stations are not designed as large carrier neutral interconnection points, the SLTEs are almost always housed in a cage at a carrier netural data center. It is this flexibility in choice of location and equipment vendor that makes the open cable model so appealing. It also facilitates hyperscalers build...
