Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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

 Anjana - The New Atlantic Leviathan Meta's Anjana cable will set a new record for Atlantic bandwidth with 24 fibre pairs each operating at 20 terabits for a total of 480 Tbps. It goes without saying that the cable is a spatial division multiplexing design. There has been a steady move South for new US cable landings over the last 15 years; Anjana is no exception. Around 2000 all Trans-Atlantic networks landed near New York or Boston. Then Marea and Dunant landed at Virginia Beach so they could directly link to Ashburn Equinix at the lowest possible latency as well as avoid 'hot spots' like New York. Now Anjana will land at Mrytle Beach, South Carolina. The farthest point South for a Atlantic cable connecting Europe and North America. See the CLS and beach manhole below. In Europe Anjana will land on Spain's North Coast at the new Telxius CLS in the city of Santander. Resiliency is the name of the game in the subsea cable world. That means physical diversity.  Meta has