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MAXIMIZING CAPACITY AND DATA RATE ACROSS ALL TYPES OF SUBMARINE CABLES BY GEOFF BENNETT
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ccording to TeleGeography, there are 486 active and planned submarine cables operating around the world today. Traditionally, these cables were designed with an engineering life of 25 years, so it’s not surprising that some of them began their design and planning phases in the closing years of the last century. As you might expect, newer submarine cables have higher performance than previous generations, as measured by a
combination of wavelength data rate and capacity. This is shown for trans-Atlantic cables spanning two decades of cable evolution in Figure 1. Note that all the figures are based on using the latest fifth-generation coherent transponders. What you can see from this table is that fiber pair capacity peaked with the MAREA cable, which is an uncompensated large-effective-area fiber cable with very short repeater spacing. As we move to space-division multiplexJULY 2022 | ISSUE 125
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