11/1/21 –NEC Corporation has been contracted by Facebook to build an ultra-high performance transatlantic subsea fiber-optic cable connecting the U.S. and Europe, a plan that calls for capacity of up to a petabit per second.

A press release said that, until recently, subsea cable was composed of 16 fiber pairs at most. Now, using NEC’s newly developed 24-fiber pair cable and repeaters, a system can deliver a maximum transmission capacity of a half petabit per second, the highest to date for a long-distance “repeatered” optical subsea cable system. That performance represents a 50% improvement in fiber count over the 16-fiber pair systems.

Per Teleography, Facebook has a stake in 13 cables. Google has an ownership stake in at least 16 current or planned undersea cables around the world. It noted that the internet giants are the ones leading undersea cable development, displacing traditional telecom giants.

Of note, OCC, an NEC subsidiary, previously reported in March that its 24 fiber pair cable can be manufactured using a wide range of existing optical fibers, according to the needs of each new cable system. International data usage across the Atlantic is expected to expand twenty-fold in the 15 years between 2021 and 2035. The region ranks among the highest growth geographies for data traffic demand, bringing ever-greater demands to reduce the cost per bit on subsea cable networks.