SUBSEA buoyant
Subsea fibre cable market buoyant
Of all the international undersea long-haul cable routes, the transatlantic offers the highest traffic rates and therefore the greatest new business potential. John Williamson reports on some of the latest cables to be installed beneath “the pond” and elsewhere.
system connecting France to the USA. This latest capacity demonstration was made possible by implementing smart spectral engineering, which included a fully flexible WDM grid and multiple modulation schemes tuning the optical transmission in order to match each channel format to line performance. Speed limits But high-speed capacity by itself isn’t the only consideration shaping the expanding subsea cable business. The need to fill gaps in the global network to augment under-served routes, or expand routes that are likely to outgrow available capacity, is another factor. In the case of the Brazil-Europe system, it was suggested when the project was first proposed that the chosen route was selected in part to keep Internet traffic out of US jurisdiction. This decision was made after the Edward Snowden US National Security Agency revelations, which he began releasing in May 2013. As well as speed and routing, network latency and round for Hibernia Networks was produced in September 2015 by the TeleGeography market research and analysis firm. The white paper notes: “Latency has become a critical performance factor for financial firms, content providers, and cloud computing providers. In the case of financial enterprises, reducing the delay by as little as a few milliseconds trip delay are becoming critical characteristics in subsea fibre cable design, routing and operations. The Network Latency White Paper
lane. However, the owners and operators of these legacy systems are also engaged in a quest for higher speeds. According to a survey published in 2015 by Sandler Research, the global submarine fibre cable industry will show a compound annual growth rate near to 7 percent in the period to 2019, and one of the key trends in this market is the upgrading of existing submarine cables. Sandler Research reports that the majority of the world’s submarine fibre cable owners are upgrading the existing 10 Gbits/s cables to 100 Gbits/s. One recent field trial illustrates the potential for upgrading such point to point links. Having previously upgraded the Apollo system to 100 Gbits/s, in July 2015 Apollo and Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks announced they had successfully demonstrated a capacity of 8 Tbits/s of data per fibre pair – equivalent to approximately 1.25 million HDTV channels simultaneously streamed – on the Apollo South
currently in the pipeline include the Liquid Sea system that will run approximately 10,000 km from South Africa to the Middle East, and the 5,900 km system planned to link Brazil with Europe. Newly-constructed subsea fibre optic cables include the 5,500 km America Europe Connect (AEConnect) between the USA and Ireland, and the 4,600 km Hibernia Express Cable System running between Canada and the UK and Ireland. Reflecting the rising demand for bandwidth, all of these new and recent fibre cables are very high capacity systems. Liquid Sea will offer speeds of 20 to 30 Tbits/s and the Brazil-Europe system up to 30 Tbits/s, while AEConnect has more than 52 Tbits/s of available capacity, and the Hibernia Express Cable System yields 10 Tbits/s per pair for each of its six fibre pairs. These multi-terabit cables put many established subsea fibre systems firmly in the slow
John Williamson
T raffic volumes carried by telecommunication networks across the world are now reaching mind-boggling proportions. According to the 2015 Cisco Visual Networking Index, for example, annual global IP traffic will hit the 1.1 zettabyte mark by the end of 2016, equivalent to 88.4 exabytes (nearly one billion gigabytes) per month. Cisco further estimates that by 2019, the corresponding figures will be 2.0 zettabytes per year. Central to industry efforts to accommodate current and forecast demand for bandwidth on long haul routes is the development and construction of new subsea fibre optic cable systems. Subsea cables
Crossing the pond: Hibernia Express Cable System is offering 10 Tbits/s per pair for each of its six fibre pairs.
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ISSUE 6 | Q1 2016
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