7/28/2020 What will next-gen submarine cable architecture look like in

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What will next-gen submarine cable architecture look like in

2020?
 04 December 2019 | Geoff Bennett

The demand for submarine cable capacity is soaring. For the period 2015-2019, submarine bre design capacity on major routes has increased at a
CAGR of 32%, including upgrades and new system builds. Can we build new cables fast enough? Should we try to squeeze more capacity out of existing
cables? If we do build new cables, can we increase the capacity beyond what is possible today?

*Statistics from Telegeography.

Those are serious questions, but let’s start with a transatlantic cable that most people agree represents the state of the art today – the MAREA cable,
which is owned jointly by Telxius, Facebook and Microsoft.

MAREA is so highly regarded because it consists of an optical bre highly optimised for coherent transmission at high modulation order.

16QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) is used on at least one of its bre pairs – a rst for production grade transatlantic transmission. In addition,
MAREA’s optical ampli ers operate at very high-power levels and are more closely spaced than normal at around 55km.

By using extremely high performance transponders, such as In nera’s ICE4, the commercial capacity on a single bre pair on MAREA is at least 24Tbps.
Note that up to 26.2Tbps of capacity was achieved in trials of ICE4, but operators will decide the optical budget safety margin required.
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7/28/2020 What will next-gen submarine cable architecture look like in
MAREA was deployed with eight bre pairs and it’s interesting to note that each one of these pairs deliversxai=AKAOjssWYvKrxmDrOJAnS3onJjXx4wGaUWx
as much capacity as all the operational
transatlantic cables in service at the time. Even so, the demand for subsea capacity is so great that we must plan now to meet the needs of the near
future.

Why not simply deploy more bre pairs in such a cable?

The answer is that the ampli er chains on submarine cables must be powered by setting up huge voltages at each end of the cable – positive at one
end and negative at the other. Based on the power level used in MAREA’s amps, and the fact that the amps are so closely spaced, there simply isn’t a
way to get enough power into the cable to supply more bre pairs.

When MAREA was designed, the goal was to maximise the capacity per bre pair – and this was a great success. But for the next generation of
transoceanic cables the focus is shifting to maximise the total cable capacity, not necessarily the capacity per bre pair. So how do we do this?

The limiting factor is total electrical power. One step would be to lower the power level of the ampli ers and increase the spacing. This would mean that
conventional modulations like 16QAM would not be able to close the link.

In the past we would need to dial down the modulation to 8QAM or QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying), but modern coherent technology introduces a
capability called probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) that can smoothly optimise the modulation e ciency to the optical budget of the link.

By operating in a lower power regime, a new cable architecture emerges, known as Space Division Multiplexing (SDM). The rationale is that, while there
is a small reduction in the capacity per bre pair with SDM, it’s possible to increase the number of pairs by 50-100 percent and achieve a much higher
total cable capacity in future submarine deployments.

Google’s Dunant cable

Google recently announced plans to bring the rst such cable into service next year – the Dunant cable between the East coast of the USA and a landing
point in Western France. The total capacity for Dunant is forecast to be 250Tbps over 12  bre pairs, compared to a potential 192Tbps for MAREA’s eight
bre pairs.

Steve Grubb, global optical architect for Facebook, has recently described some of the advances needed to achieve a transatlantic cable capacity of
1Pbps using SDM techniques. So, it does appear that the next wave of subsea cables will operate with an SDM architecture. But what about current
generations of subsea cables?
For systems like MAREA, with large area, positive dispersion bres, there may still be some room to increase capacity – perhaps by 25% to 50% with
In nera’s next generation of optical engines.

Before cables like MAREA were deployed there were tens of “dispersion managed” submarine cables in operation – including a very early transatlantic
cable that rst went into service in 2003.

Recently In nera’s ICE4 technology was used to double the existing capacity on that cable with the result that the commercial life will be extended yet
again.
Similarly, there are hundreds of small cables that are laid without ampli ers to cover short underwater distances across straits, between islands, or laid
in festoon routes along coastlines between cities.

The capacity of one such cable, operated by OTEGLOBE, was also doubled recently using ICE4 technology.

The demand for subsea capacity continues to soar, and we must meet that demand. In the longer term, SDM promises a great way to increase cable
capacity for future long-distance installations. Meanwhile, advances in high-performance submarine transponder technology continue to boost the
capacity of all types of existing cable.

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