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Google says the The fiber-optic cable it builds beyond the Atlantic Ocean will be the fastest of its kind. When the cable is commissioned next year, the company estimates that it will transmit about 250 terabits per second, fast enough so that all contents of the Library of Congress are transferred from Virginia to France three times a second. It's about 56% faster than Marea's Facebook and Microsoft cable, which can transmit about 160 terabits per second between Virginia and Spain.
Optical fiber networks work by sending light to thin strands of glass. Optical fiber cables, which are about the diameter of a garden hose, contain several pairs of fibers. Google's new cable is so fast that it carries more fiber pairs. Today, most long distance submarine cables contain six or eight pairs of optical fibers. Google announced Friday that its new cable, dubbed Dunant, should be the first to include 12 pairs, thanks to the new technology developed by Google and SubCom, which designs, manufactures and deploys submarine cables.
Dunant may not be the fastest in the long run: the Japanese technology giant NEC has announced a technology that will make long-distance submarine cables with 16 pairs of fiber optics. And Vijay Vusirikala, head of network architecture and optical engineering at Google, says the company is already considering the use of 24-pair cables.
The rise of intercontinental cables and their increasing capacity reflect the continued growth of Internet traffic. They allow activists to broadcast events in far-away countries, help businesses buy and sell products around the world, and facilitate international relations. "Many people still believe that international telecommunications are done by satellite," said Atsushi Kuwahara, NEC executive. "It was true in 1980, but right now, 99% of international telecommunications are submarines."
So much capacity is added that, for the moment, it exceeds demand. Animations presented in a recent New York Times This article illustrates the number of submarine cables that has exploded since 1989. This growth continues. Alan Mauldin, of the Telegeography research firm, says that only about 30% of the potential capacity of major submarine cable routes is currently used – and that more than 60 new cables are expected to enter service by now. This is reminiscent of the 1990s bubble. Telecommunications has buried much more fiber in the soil and in the ocean than it needs for the coming years.
A selection of optical fiber cable products manufactured by SubCom.
Brian Smith / SubCom
But the current growth of new cables is less driven by telecom operators, but more so by companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, who are looking for more and more bandwidth for video, photo and video streaming. 39, other data between their global data centers. And according to experts, as undersea cable technologies improve, it is not foolish for companies to build new faster routes between continents, even with so much fiber already unused in the world. ocean.
Control their own destiny
Mauldin says that even though there is still a lot of capacity available, companies like Google and Facebook prefer to have a dedicated capacity for their own use. This partly explains why large technology companies have invested in new cables through consortia or, in some cases, have built their own cables.
"When we plan our network, it's important to know if we will have network capacity," says Vusirikala, of Google. "One way to find out is to control our own destiny by building our own cables."
Another factor is diversification. Having more cables means that there are alternative ways for the data in case of breakage or malfunction of a cable. At the same time, more and more people outside Europe and North America are using the Internet, often via smartphones. This has prompted companies to think about new routes, such as between North and South America, or Europe and Africa, says Mike Hollands, leader of the European data center company Interxion. The Marea cable ticks these two boxes, allowing Facebook and Microsoft to route their routes more quickly to North Africa and the Middle East, while creating an alternative to Europe in case one or more traditional routes are disturbed by an earthquake.
Cost per bit
There are also financial incentives for technology companies. By holding the cables instead of renting them to telecom operators, Google and other tech giants can potentially save money in the long run, says Mauldin.
The cost of building and deploying a new submarine cable does not diminish. However, as companies find ways to pump more data through these cables more quickly, their value increases.
There are a few ways to increase the performance of an optical fiber communication system. One is to increase the energy used to push data from one end to the other. The problem is that to prevent the data signal from being degraded, submarine cables need repeaters about every 100 kilometers, says Vusirikala. These repeaters amplify not only the signal, but all the noises introduced along the way, thus decreasing the value of the increase in energy.
A rendering of one of the cable vessels of the class "Reliance" of SubCom.
SubCom
You can also increase the amount of data that each fiber pair of a fiber optic cable can carry. A technique called "Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing" now allows more than 100 wavelengths to be sent on a single pair of fibers.
Or you can integrate more pairs of fibers into a cable. Traditionally, each pair of fiber optic cable required its own repeater; These repeaters take up space inside the cable. Kuwahara therefore argues that adding repeaters would require changes in the way cables are built, deployed and maintained.
To solve this problem, Google and SubCom use a technique called Spatial Distribution Multiplexing (SDM) to use only eight repeaters with 12 pairs of fibers. This will reduce the capacity of each pair, but the extra pairs will more than compensate, says SubCom technical director Georg Mohs.
"This was already part of our toolbox," says Mohs, but, like other companies, SubCom is more committed to adding more wavelengths in pairs fiber.
NEC takes a different route from Google and SubCom. According to Kuwahara, NEC integrates more pairs of optical fibers into its cables by essentially narrowing its repeaters, so that they integrate perfectly with existing equipment designs.
No matter how companies like SubCom and NEC add more pairs, the result is the same: cables that can transfer more data than ever before. This means that the total cost per data bit sent on the cable is lower.
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