Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Most subsea cables connect countries, but increasingly we are seeing cables that serve only a single country for a variety of reasons.Either the country is not contiguous like Indonesia or the Philippines or the country is exceptionally large with isolated densely populated cities like Australia. Or it is sparsely settled like Alaska's coast which has no significant land infrastructure like roads or gas pipes to serve as telecom rights of way.  Unitirreno belongs to the former category. This SDM (spatial division multiplexing) 24 fibre pair cable will link Italy's principal territories, the Boot, Sicily, and Sardinia. The design throughput per fibre pair is 20 terabits or 480 terabits per second for the cable. Unitirreno, if built, will be a very high capacity system. Nearly half a petabit.  Here is the company's key sales pitch and commercial justifications: 1. Unitirreno cuts the latency in half between Sicily and Genoa and provides a completely diverse path to the terre

Technology: Standard 100G wave coherent optics. Shorter repeater spacings to maximize per fibre pair throughput.  Fibre Pairs: 8.  Founding Fathers: Facebook and Microsoft Consortium Members: Facebook, Microsoft, and Telxius.  RFS: May, 2018.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Spain.  Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Bilbao, Spain.  Notable Features: First cable to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Also first cable to adopt the open cable system model where each consortium member selects their own submarine line termination gear and owns either fibre pairs or spectrum.  Potential Throughput: 224 Tbps.  Marea is the first cable to give the cold shoulder to New York City and the UK. It directly links Ashburn Equinix via a Virginia Beach landing to Continental Europe with a Spanish landing. The cable completely bypasses the UK and the Northeastern US. This reflected Ashburn Equinix' rising importance and the desire of network planners  to avoid NYC with its complex conduit systems