NEC Corporation has been contracted by Facebook to build an ultra-high performance transatlantic subsea fiber-optic cable connecting the USA and Europe, according to NEC. The project will take advantage of NEC’s newly developed 24 fiber-pair cable and repeaters, which can transmit at 0.5 Petabit (1,000 trillion bits) per second.
“To support growing bandwidth, next generation subsea systems will offer Petabit-scale transmission,” said Dr. Bernhard Deutsch, VP & GM, Optical Fiber & Cable, Corning Inc. “To achieve the required performance, cabling processes must capture the advantaged optical attenuation and large effective area of our ultra-low-loss fibers.”
In March of this year, NEC announced that it had completed full qualification of subsea repeaters and optical cable containing up to 24 fiber pairs, which was a step change compared with the 16 fiber pair systems generally available. The development allows subsea telecom cables to attain superior traffic capacity, while reducing the cost per bit. It also enables better connectivity in high-density subsea branches.
International data usage across the Atlantic is expected to expand twenty-fold in the 15 years between 2021 and 2035, according to Telegeography. The region ranks among the highest growth geographies for data traffic demand, bringing ever-greater demands to reduce the cost per bit on subsea cable networks.
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