For submarine cables too, such web-scale companies are now critical players in driving capacity demand, and increasingly are involved in the ownership of cables — as consortium members of purchasers of partial networks like a fiber pair.
Figure 2: Top Five Companies by Market Capitalization (NASDAQ Composite)
In 2014, web-scale and private companies like these accounted for over 50 percent of trans-Atlantic traffic, and already 44 percent of transPacific bandwidth and intraAsia bandwidth. By 2016, the percentage on the trans-Pacific routes will exceed 50 percent, and by 2021 it is expected to be 66 percent. Technology’s and Enabler
Role:
Driver
The dilemma facing cable owners and operators in the trans-Pacific is how to increase profits when capacity demand is increasing, but at the same time capacity prices are dropping. Submarine network infrastructure is expensive to build, maintain and operate — extracting the maximum capacity from it, to reduce overall cost per bit as well as meet increasing demand is essential.
Moore’s Law has been one of the enablers of the increasing bandwidth demand. The power of microprocessors has continued to rise exponentially, allowing the development of powerful smart phones, which in turn make mobile social media and content a reality. The same exponential development in semiconductor technology is as much responsible for the power of coherent optical transmission equipment as any optical technology. Together with some new optical technologies,
such as wavelength selective switches (WSS), increased semiconductor processing power, lower power consumption, size and costs, have made 100 Gb/s coherent optical systems a reality. SoftDecision FEC, transmit spectral shaping, advanced modulation schemes such as 8D-2QAM, QPSK and 16QAM are practical due to semiconductor technology advances. And the developments in software for mobile phone operating systems, and applications running on smart phones and tablets,
has similarly had positive spin-off into coherent optical transmissions systems. A unique new modulation format made possible in large part by the latest silicon DSP technology is an eightdimensional coding scheme for extreme performance on the longest and most challenging trans-Pacific segments. Named “8D-2QAM,” it has already been proven commercially on segments more than 11,000 km long and provides a 20 percent increase in reach or a 20 to 40 percent increase in practical capacity when compared to leading current 100 Gb/s BPSK solutions. Along with new spectral shaping technology, also enabled by advanced new SLTE chipsets, an optical technology called “Flexible Grid” allows the WDM optical wavelengths to be squeezed closer together, with different spacing in different parts of the spectrum if desired. This allows more waves to be deployed within the available bandwidth of the cable. On its own, Flexible Grid can enable an approximate 33 percent increase in equipped capacity of coherent 100 Gb/s transmission.