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

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

Also, I don't just mean in the MRC, but in the NRC of the plant needed to supply and transmit that much power.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions

Midwest Internet Exchange

The Brothers WISP

From: "Rod Beck" <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com>
To: "Barbara Fox" <bfox@ciena.com>, "Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka@seacom.com>, nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2021 10:11:29 AM
Subject: Re: [**EXTERNAL**] Re: Half Fibre Pair

What is interesting is this new deep sea design. In the old days cables had 4 to 8 pairs max. Now I am seeing Orange talking about 18 pairs and 24 pairs. With more widely regeneration.

https://www.orange.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021/orange-takes-leading-role-us-europe-route-two-new-generation-submarine
After the landing of the Dunant cable, a Google project announced back in March 2020, Orange announces it is now ready for service for its wholesale and business customers. With 12 fibre pairs with over 30 Tbps of capacity each, multiplying by three the previous generation of transatlantic submarine cables capacity. Orange also announces the signature of a partnership on the AMITIÉ cable ...
www.orange.com


Regards,

Rdoerick.


From: Fox, Barbara <bfox@ciena.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2021 3:52 PM
To: Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.com>; Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com>; nanog@nanog.org <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: RE: [**EXTERNAL**] Re: Half Fibre Pair
 

I asked a submarine guy how much the fibers can carry because this sounded low to me.  His response:

 

it depends on the type of cable. Older cables (with embedded dispersion compensation) have a lot less capacity and I have seen some as low as 1Tb/s per fiber pair and some as high as 10Tb/s per fiber pair. All newer D+ Cables that have been deployed in the last 5 years and will be the only cables deployed going forward can easily carry 20Tb/s of capacity per fiber pair. Something Like Havfrue can support 22T per fiber pair and there are 8 fiber pairs for a total of 176T.

 

Barbara

 

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+bfox=ciena.com@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Mark Tinka
Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2021 7:13 AM
To: Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com>; nanog@nanog.org
Subject: [**EXTERNAL**] Re: Half Fibre Pair

 

 

On 1/27/21 13:39, Rod Beck wrote:

How much spectrum is a half fibre? It must be standardized in some fashion.


It would be based on the amount of capacity each fibre in the overall system can carry across a given line system span.

So say a cable system is able to carry 960Gbps per fibre pair, and it has 5 fibre pairs, that means a half fibre pair purchased by one of the consortium members would be 480Gbps.

It is also possible for a consortium member to own a full + a fractional fibre pair, e.g., two and a-half fibre pairs. In such a contract, for example, say a 24 fibre-pair system could carry 1.2Tbps per fibre pair, that member would have 3Tbps of capacity.

Mark.