Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Google's SOL cable is the first Trans-Atlantic network to connect Florida to Europe with a landing at the Telxius Santander CLS on the Northern Spanish coast. The other cable, Nuvem, announced some time ago, will link the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina CLS owned and operated by DC BLOX to a landing near Lisbon. Details are sparse regarding SOL, but it will probably be similar in performance and design to the 16 fibre pair Nuvem cable that clocks 384 Tbps. The Florida landing is in the Palm Coast area between Jacksonville and Orlando. An interesting feature is that both cables do island hopping. Both cables land in Bermuda and Azores (where a US Air Force base is located). Island hopping serves three goals. The first is power to offset voltage drop. Intermediate power feeding en route improves throughput. The more often a cable can feed, the higher the bandwidth. The other factor is optical amplifier noise. Amplification introduces noise which accumulates from amplifier to amplifier. ...

The 2Africa cable is one of the most ambitious and important subsea projects ever undertaken. It spans a record 45,000 kilometers or 28,000 US miles. As the map shows, it extends from Mumbai to  London with European landings, completely encircles Africa, and provides dense Middle Eastern coverage. 2Africa has a record 46 landings which enables it to serve 33 countries across Europe, Middle East,  Africa, India, and Pakistoan. It is unique in having multiple landings in several countries including 4 in Egypt, 4 in Saudi Arabia, 4 in South Africa, and finally 2 in Congo as well as Kenya, Mozambique, and Spain. A signature theme of the 2Africa project is to improve network uptime through physical diversity in the form of multiple, widely separated new landings in key countries. For example, the subsea network brings much needed diversity to Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure with the first CLS outside Lagos several hundred kilometers to the Southeast.  The 2Africa c...