FEATURE
NEXT GENERATION TRANSPONDER TECHNOLOGY TO ALIGN WITH SUBSEA SDM CABLES BY SUSHIN SURESAN
U
ndersea cables dramatically increase the reach of the internet by connecting new populations to provide them the economic benefits of high-speed connectivity. New applications driving large amounts of data transfer continue to emerge – Metaverse, new VR/ AR experiences, and ML/AI on demand. This has led to more data being managed at the edge of the network, but warehouse-scale computing still requires massive amounts of data to be exchanged between data centers or between data center and the network edge. Gartner predicts global cloud spending to increase to $917B by 2025. While communications service providers are evolving to offer cloud and content services with 5G architectures, hyperscale cloud and content providers continue to connect their data centers across the oceans with subsea cables while adding capacity and new routes for reliability.
72
SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE
Building and deploying subsea cables can take a village. Planners have to forecast capacity requirements today and meet the demands of the future. There must be physical infrastructure, including power to land the cable and house the SLTE and PFE equipment, terrestrial fiber connectivity into POP or Data Center, and there must be a redundancy plan with alternate deployed cable routes in case of any failure or fiber cut. And while subsea cables are a part of the growing digital economy, they have now become a critical asset to our internet infrastructure. New highly available workloads and services with consistent performance are delivered across subsea cables and this is driving additional routes to serve increasing capacity needs.