Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Facebook engineers during an interview on the Waterworth project provided details about their next big project. 1. Facebook is planning to build the first one petabit per second Atlantic cable. No details yet available on end points. Given traffic flows it is most likely to directly connect Continental Europe and the US. 2. META engineering is looking at three options to achieve one petabit per second throughput. A. Using both the C and L spectrum. This would effectively double the bandwidth. B. Cable will definitely be SDM (spatial division multiplexing). Strong likelihood that will be 48 pairs. C. Another possibility is two core optical fibre in order to double the bandwidth per pair. 3. I believe the most likely option is using C and L bandwidth. Arelion has incorporated L band spectrum into its DWDM Layer 1 service between Atlanta data centers and Ashburn Equinix using Infinera gear. Colt and Sparkle have used the L band on terrestrial routes. Most DWDM equipment today offers both ...

Several sources have whispered in my ear that META is planning a new 16 fibre pair cable that will encompass the world going from the US East Coast to the US West Coast via the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The most ambitious subsea project ever undertaken. I do not know the exact routing. I know that the cable will launch from the American East Coast and will go down the West African Coast to South Africa and then head straight to Mumbai. It is not clear if Europe will be online or not. From Mumbai it will head straight to Australia and then up to the US West Coast. I speculate that there may be branching units to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But the basic routing is US/South Africa/India/Australia/US. What is not clear is if there will be branching units to add more countries to the cable.  This semi-secret cable reflects META's desire for network resiliency given the four month Red Sea down time that AAE-1 and other subsea cables suffered during the first half ...