On 1/27/21 19:54, Mike Hammett wrote:

I believe strand counts were small because the power needed for that many amplifiers was too much to bear for budgets.

Also because the amount of capacity we are talking about nowadays, driven by the content folk, is something telco's could only (and still) dream of.

I suspect it's a combination of more power efficient amplifiers and a greater willingness to bear the extra costs to get the capacity that hyperscalers need.

Have many of those higher strand count cables been proposed that have any distance to them that don't have a variety of hyperscalers in the anchor tenants?

You guessed it... it's not traditional telco's pushing cable builds anymore.

It's a lot cheaper to power a 300 km cable than a 3,000 km cable.

It's not uncommon to have multiple fibre pairs on shorter spans and fewer on longer/express ones. But yes, longer systems cost a lot more money; for everything, not just power.

Mark.