Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

EXA unveiled its first home grown long haul subsea cable project today. Meridian is a 24 fibre pair cable that should reach or exceed the half petabit per second transmission milestone. It will land in New Jersey, and at Brean, UK, where EXA's low latency Express cable (a Hibernia Atlantic project that was RFS in 2015) lands. I believe EXA will deploy a prefabricated, modular cable landing station in New Jersey to ensure the physical diversity that hyperscaler clients desire. Another possibility is the NJFX facility. The term 'Meridian' can refer to the Meridian line that goes through Greenwich, UK and connects the North and South poles. The term also means 'the peak of success or excellence'.  This cable project is a gutsy move. There have no pure carrier projects connecting North America to Europe since the Express cable went live. From 2016 to the present all Atlantic cables have been hyperscaler owned and designed. So EXA is counting on hyperscalers to take fibr...

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...

Reliable sources indicate that Google's 16 fiber pair Nuvem (Portuguese for 'cloud') cable has landed. There is typically a lag of a year between landings and RFS. So expect the system to be fully activated next Spring. I assume, without any insider knowledge, that either EXA or Telxius will acquire spectrum or a fiber pair on Nuvem. The cable's design capacity is 384 Tbps. Nuvem lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, also home to Anjana and Firmina. For Google, which owns the South Atlantic Firmina cable, this solves a big problem. It can move traffic between South America and Europe via the Myrtle Beach CLS. It also diversifies the routing of Google's Atlantic traffic and reduces latency for both the Southern US and Southern Europe. Interestingly enough, Google used a subsidiary as the landing partner at Myrtle Beach, and at Sines, Portugal. The hyperscalers are becoming increasingly vertically integrated. In the past it was customary to outsource landings and cab...

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. ...