Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Google's Firmina is South America's first spatial division multiplexing cable. It is Google's third South American cable after Curie and Monet. Spatial division multiplexing maximizes total cable throughput by adding more fibre pairs as opposed to maximizing per pair throughput. The result is 12 to 32 pairs per cable versus 2 to 8 for conventional systems. A SDM cable will run each pair at 12 to 20 Tbps versus a conventional cable at 25 Tbps or slightly higher. Firmina has 16 fibre pairs with initial 320 Tbps capacity. It is the highest capacity cable to serve South America and dwarfs the rest of the subsea networks.  Firmina illustrates the rising dominance of the American tech companies in the subsea cable world. These companies account for 50% to 80% of global traffic. They build their own cables as opposed to leasing capacity because it reduces cost per bit. Moreover, complete network control and transparency leads to better performance in terms of uptime and latency. T...