Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

 At an Irish Peering event in late 2025, Geoff Bennett, Director of Solutions and Technology at Nokia, gave a presentation on the development of spatial division multiplexing. We will do a slide-by-slide exposition of his presentation. ***Geoff's estimate is that there are 570 operational fibre optic cables world wide. This makes sense given the large number of islands with subsea cables. In fact, given the efforts of the EU to extend cable to the many islands of its member states, these figures should steadily rise. Google is also ramping cable connectivity to Pacific and Indian island clusters, including Christmas Island, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Maldives, etc. ***Geoff notes that 81 cables are in planning or deployment stage. ***It is almost obligatory these days to note that these cables make possible over $10 trillion in daily global transactions, driven by financial flows and international trade.