NEC Corp. (NEC; TSE: 6701) says it will build a transatlantic submarine cable network for Facebook. The system will feature 24 fiber pairs and will have design capacity of half a petabit per second.
The 24 fiber pairs and the very high capacity implies the use of space-division multiplexing (SDM) transmission technology. NEC and its OCC Corp. subsidiary announced this past March qualification of 24-fiber-pair cables and repeaters and described the combination as compatible with SDM. Representatives from Sumitomo Electric Industries and Corning were quoted at the time as saying their respective fibers were compatible with the OCC cabling process.
Facebook already has transatlantic cable systems in place, most notably MAREA and HAVFRUE (see “Microsoft, Facebook partner for MAREA undersea cable system” and “HAVFRUE consortium targets transatlantic submarine cable system”).
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