Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Ooredoo is a multinational mobile service provider with operations in Algeria, Tunisia, Palestine, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Oman, Maldives, and Indonesia. Its 2025 revenues were $6.4 billion revenues. Like many multinational mobile carriers such as Vodafone and Bharti, Ooredoo is becoming an important subsea cable player. Its first noticeable success was winning the competition to host the 2Africa CLS in Oman. More recently, Ooredoo announced in January 2025 the Fiber In The Gulf (FIG) cable that will link Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. Due to the short distances between the countries involved, this 24 fibre pair cable is expected to achieve 720 Tbps or 30 Tbps per pair, a Middle East record. The shorter the distance between DWDM optical nodes, the less optical errors accumulate, and hence the greater the throughput. The higher optical power or intensity required for long subsea spans inevitably creates nonlinear errors or optical distortion th...

The two fibre pair Greenland Connect system links Greenland to Iceland and Canada's Newfoundland province. Photos of the cable landing stations below. The first photo is the Icelandic facility with the one below it being the Greenland counterpart. Greenland Connects lands South of Reykjavik and uses the same landing station as the DANICE cable. In Greenland it lands in Nuuk, the country's capital, and also in Qaqortoq. Although the cable began with 2x 10G waves in operation, it has been upgraded to 12.8 Tbps by Alcatel and Hauwei Marine.  Greenland Connect went live on March 23, 2009. It brought the first terrestrial Internet connectivity to Greenland and slashed RTDs to content delivery points by over 500 milliseconds. Up to that point Greenland had relied solely on geostationary satellites. I strongly believe that the Far North, which includes Siberia, Arctic Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and the Far Northern parts of the Nordic countries, will experience massive migration and ...

University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands has set up a 4.6 kilometer free space optical link that traverses the city center. Its throughput is 5.7 Tbps. Unfortunately, I don't see signal to noise measurements. Free space lasers suffer from atmospheric turbulence such as rain, fog, and clouds. They work well in outer space. The technology is the basis of the new NASA deep space communications network. Click here for the short paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21058v1. 

The Japanese National Institute of Information and Communication set a single fibre pair transmission record of 22.9 petabits last November. To achieve it, multicore was combined with multiple frequency bands including the standard C-band, L-band (in limited production use today), and S-band. The C-band is the work horse of optical infrared transmission with a wavelength range of 1530-1550 nanometers. These wavelengths experience the least attenuation in a glass medium; they are also ideal for erbium-doped optical amplifiers. The L-band includes the 1565 to 1625 nanometer range. Its attenuation in glass is the second lowest. Arelion has used L-band in its US East Coast network. At least one Pacific cable has used L-band as well. I believe it is PLNC which connects HK to the US. The S-band ranges from 1460 to 1515 nanometers. The 'S' stands for short band. It has the third lowest attenuation in glass. The Japanese combined these three bands with a 38 core fibre strand which they...