Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Google's SOL cable is the first Trans-Atlantic network to connect Florida to Europe with a landing at the Telxius Santander CLS on the Northern Spanish coast. The other cable, Nuvem, announced some time ago, will link the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina CLS owned and operated by DC BLOX to a landing near Lisbon. Details are sparse regarding SOL, but it will probably be similar in performance and design to the 16 fibre pair Nuvem cable that clocks 384 Tbps. The Florida landing is in the Palm Coast area between Jacksonville and Orlando. An interesting feature is that both cables do island hopping. Both cables land in Bermuda and Azores (where a US Air Force base is located). Island hopping serves three goals. The first is power to offset voltage drop. Intermediate power feeding en route improves throughput. The more often a cable can feed, the higher the bandwidth. The other factor is optical amplifier noise. Amplification introduces noise which accumulates from amplifier to amplifier. ...

Technology: Standard 100G wave coherent optics. Shorter repeater spacings to maximize per fibre pair throughput.  Fibre Pairs: 8.  Founding Fathers: Facebook and Microsoft Consortium Members: Facebook, Microsoft, and Telxius.  RFS: May, 2018.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Spain.  Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Bilbao, Spain.  Notable Features: First cable to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Also first cable to adopt the open cable system model where each consortium member selects their own submarine line termination gear and owns either fibre pairs or spectrum.  Potential Throughput: 224 Tbps.  Marea is the first cable to give the cold shoulder to New York City and the UK. It directly links Ashburn Equinix via a Virginia Beach landing to Continental Europe with a Spanish landing. The cable completely bypasses the UK and the Northeastern US. This reflected Ashburn Equinix' rising importance and the desire of network planners  to avo...