Same Pipes, Faster Speed by Andy Lumsden
The buck however, does not stop at the service provider’s end, for ultimately, the subsea cable carriers must produce the bandwidth required to support the industry’s growth either by laying new cables or adding new capacity to legacy systems. The impact of this increase in end-user demand for bandwidth on the subsea cable industry will be one of the topics to be discussed at this year’s Pacific Telecommunications Council’s conference, to be held at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, in Honolulu, Hawaii on 1821 January 2009. As it is now, bandwidth demand across most routes, including across the Pacific, is increasing at a phase never seen before, and industry analysts TeleGeography have predicted trans-Pacific demand to increase at a compounded annual growth rate of 36 per cent between 2008 and 2014. The tall order for cable operators is to choose and deploy the right next-generation networking technologies into our new systems and existing optical fiber network to provide the bandwidth required.
How does the subsea cable industry keep up with the insatiable demand for bandwidth? Andy Lumsden shares key technologies that enable current subsea cables to carry more capacity.
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Ever wonder how much bandwidth you are consuming every day? You need not look further than your surroundings to see the increasing volume of bandwidth being used. From your always-on 3.5G phone to your high-definition television set top box, it is no wonder that more people are seeking
the fastest fiber-to-the-home broadband connections that pump 100 Mbps into their homes. At its Spring Policy Summit earlier this year, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), a US-based industry association and standards body, went as far as to warn of possible shortages if service providers are unable to keep pace with network upgrades to support bandwidth intensive applications demanded by both the enterprise and consumer markets.
Take the case of the Unity cable system that is being built by a consortium of six companies including Pacnet. The multi-terabit stateof-the-art cable can now transmit up to 96 channels of 10 Gbps bandwidth per fiber, across 10,000 km without the need for regeneration – a huge jump from the 16-32 channels per fiber capacity of cables used in the late nineties. Additional capacity yield is also made possible by improvements in technologies, U-FEC (forward error correction) type coding and phase modulation.