Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The 24 fibre pair repeatered cable links Genoa, Rome, Sardinia, and Sicily. It is very high capacity. Each fibre pair can transmit slightly in excess of 26 terabits per second for a grand total of over 624 Tbps. This is likely the highest transmission rate of any repeatered subsea cable to date. Uniterreno is constructing a Rome data center to which the cable will be connected. Unidata is the name of the data center division.  The cable illustrates a number of subsea communication trends. The 24 fibre pair count has become the de facto standard. When I worked at Hibernia Atlantic between 2005 and 2011, cables never exceeded 8 pairs. That was the technical and economic ceiling. In contrast, Facebook's Waterworth, Uniterreno, Anjana, Candle, and Medusa are all 24 pair systems. So half petabit repeatered cables are the new normal. Uniterreno also illustrates a recent trend to build very high subsea capacity cables that serve a single nation. High capacity single nation cables are quit...

The conflict between China and the West is exacerbating bandwidth shortages on key routes like Marseille to Singapore. AAE1 is maxed out just like SWM5. Both will be upgraded this year, but I believe all the incremental capacity will be snatched up even before upgrades are finished and the capacity delivered to customers. Furthermore, China Unicom is the lead AAE1 consortium member with China Mobile also selling capacity on the system. Avoiding carriers incorporated in China makes intercontinental capacity shopping is an excruciating exercise. I've been seeking Express AAE1 100G for almost a year for clients for whom China is a red line. Bandwidth sourcing has become a marathon. 😄 In light of this, I recommend buyers consider Peace despite the fact that it is a Chinese financed project. Encryption does work. It will not protect the IP overhead, which include the IP addresses, but the data payload itself will remain safe. Moreover, there are Peace providers such as PCCW or TELIN t...

Lisbon/Lagos; 100G; Equiano; $19K; 2 years. Mumbai//Singapore; 100G; $20K; 3 years. Coresite 1Wilshire/NY4; 100G; $3900; 3 years. Dallas Equinix/Ashburn Equinix; 100G; $2200; 3 years. Singapore Equinix/Tokyo Equinix; 100G; $15000; 3 years. Nikhef/AM5; Linear Dark Fibre Pair; 350 Euros; 3 years. Milan/Athens; 100G; $6500; 3 years. NY4/SP4; 100G; $8500; 3 years. Ashburn Equinix/Telehouse 2; 100G; Dunant; $5800; 3 years.

Most Layer 1 bandwidth buyers focus their efforts on EXA's three Hibernia Atlantic cables, Aquacoms' AEC-1 and AEC-2 assets, and Marea and Dunant. As a group, those subsea networks probably account for 80% of wavelength transactions across the Pond. Two lesser well known alternatives are Amitié and Grace Hopper. Amitié means friendship in French. Not surprisingly, it connects Boston via a Lynn, Massachusetts landing at a Hibernia CLS to Bordeaux, France. This spatial division multiplexing 16 fibre pair main trunk cable is a Meta project. Meta owns 80% of the network capacity with the balance held by the minority partners of Orange, Vodafone, and Aquacoms. To be more precise, Amitié branches in the Eastern Atlantic to the UK and France. Twelve fibre pairs land at Bude, Cornwall, and sixteen pairs at the Orange La Porge CLS, a short distance from Bordeaux. Note that 16 pairs land in the US, but a total of 28 on the European side. The branching unit is using optical switching to ...

 Like Anjana , Firmina is a content provider project. Google is the owner and bank for the 16 fibre pair (main trunk) spatial division multiplexing cable. The subsea network will connect the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina cable landing station to a Telxius CLS in Praia Grande (near Sao Paulo) and two other landings in Uruguay and Argentina. I think Google picked South Carolina because it represents a good latency compromise as some of the traffic is destined for Miami and some for Ashburn Equinix. It also improves the Google network's overall resiliency and its cloud infrastructure. I have noticed that Google has a tendency to run its fibre pairs at lower transmission speeds than Facebook. The design transmission rate for this system is 15 Tbps per pair whereas Facebook's Anjana is 20 terabits. So Firmina's design aggregate transmission rate day one is 240 Tbps. A quarter of a petabit.  Telxius has purchased a fibre pair on life-of-system IRU. I expect others will be looking ...

Meta's Anjana cable sets an Atlantic bandwidth record with 24 fibre pairs each transmitting 20 terabits per second for a total of nearly a half petabit. This huge capacity reflects its spatial division multiplexing (SDM) design. Traditional subsea cable designs maximize capacity per pair, but this leads to nonlinear signal distortions once a threshold is exceeded. Hence additional power to boost the rate above the threshold yields only small gains. This inefficient use of power limits fiber pair counts to 8 or less per cable with most cables rarely exceeding 150 Tbps. In contast, SDM increases the total bandwidth punch by operating each pair at lower transmission rates to avoid these nonlinear signal distortions. In turn, the lower transmission rates free up power to support enough more pairs to sharply raise total cable throughput, which ranges from 200 Tbps to a half petabit per second.  Another notable feature of Anjana is that it lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Santa...