TE Subcom Demos 100G Transatlantic Upgrade

One of the places that the impact of 100G technology is most eagerly awaited is under the Atlantic Ocean, where no new cable system has yet been turned up for a decade and 40G is now already carrying the load in some cases. But that has meant that 100G would first need to be able to handle longer distances (6,000+km) on older fiber, and today TE SubCom demonstrated it’s ready to do just that.

In a field experiment, the TE Connectivity division successfully demonstrated 100Gbps DP-QPSK coherent wavelengths across the Atlantic with total capacity of 4.4Tbps on a single fiber on an actual cable built in 2001. Of course that doesn’t narrow it down very much since Hibernia Atlantic, Tata TGN, Reliance FLAG, and TAT-14 were all completed that year, but if I had to guess which I’d go with Tata’s TGN cable since it was actually built by Tyco back then.  Regardless, the next wave of capacity upgrades seems to be just about ready to roll.

Operators have been mostly depending on such electronics upgrades to handle expected traffic growth for some time to come, although there are now a few brand new cable projects in the works. The first to come online will probably be Hibernia’s new low latency effort, Project Express, in about a year. Others, like the WASACE cable and Emerald Express seem to have more hoops yet to jump through.

 

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Categories: Undersea cables