Top Tech 2018
Undersea
Every Shark
Counted
Sharks and rays
are threatened
worldwide, but
even scientists
who study them
haven’t been able to
W
quantify the extent
of the problem.
­Vulcan Technology,
in Seattle, a
philanthropic
entity of Microsoft
cofounder Paul
Allen, aims to fill in
the missing data. Its
three-year Global
FinPrint project is
counting sharks, rays,
and other marine
life around coral
reefs, using remote
underwater video
stations as well as a
video-­processing AI
that helps identify
animals caught on
camera. The survey
of 400 reefs is
scheduled to wrap up
this year. Already, the
data has been used
by Belize to create
a ray sanctuary, and
it’s informing the
Dominican ­Republic’s
efforts to protect
sharks. The project
has also generated
intriguing clips of
eels, sea turtles, and
sea snakes—which
admittedly don’t have
quite the viral pull of
cat videos.
36  | jan 2018 | North American | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG
01.TopTech18.Cable.NA.indd 36
Data
Monster
A Hong Kong-to-L.A. submarine cable will move
144,000 gigabits per second
h e n a n e w u n de r se a communications cable
becomes operational late this year, it will break the
record for a key metric: data rate times distance. In a
single second, its six fiber-optic pairs, stretching roughly
13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) between Hong Kong
and Los Angeles, will be able to send some 144 terabits in both directions. That’s
as much data as you’d find in several hundred Blu-ray discs. The cable’s main
purpose is to connect Facebook and Google data centers in East Asia with those
in the United States.
The new cable is part of an ongoing trans- dent for technical infrastructure, told the
formation of the submarine fiber-optic cable Optical Fiber Communication Conference
network. Originally, that network carried tele- and Exposition (OFC) last March. And fiber-
phone calls and faxes. Later those subsea con- optic cable technology has to run to keep up.
duits served primarily to shuttle data between So far, the technology has been able to sat-
Internet users and a myriad of service provid- isfy the exploding demand. For more than
ers. Now, it’s mostly transferring content and three decades, the growth of fiber-optic data
cloud-computing offerings between the data rates has outpaced Moore’s Law. New types of
centers of a handful of tech giants. fibers introduced in the early 1980s boosted
Last year, such f lows accounted for the capacity of an individual fiber from
77 percent of the traffic coursing beneath 90 megabits per second to more than a giga-
the Atlantic and 60 percent of that under the bit. Better optical transmitters pushed rates
Pacific, says Alan Mauldin, research director to 10 gigabits per second in the 1990s. And by
at TeleGeography, a market-research unit 2000, all-optical amplifiers combined with
of California-based PriMetrica. No wonder new optics could pack dozens of 10‑Gb data
Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all now streams at closely spaced wavelengths into a
buy large positions in submarine cable com- single fiber and carry that information hun-
panies and operate cable landing points. dreds or thousands of kilometers. By 2010,
Google, for one, needs to double its trans- a more sophisticated modulation scheme
mission capacity every year to sustain the increased the data rate per wavelength used
seamless appearance of its “Cloud 3.0” com- so that the same fibers that had carried 10 Gb/s
puting, Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice presi­ on a single wavelength could convey 10 times
illustration by MCKIBILLO; photo-illustration by Gluekit
12/14/17 9:03 AM
01.TopTech18.Cable.NA.indd 37 12/14/17 9:03 AM
 Top Tech 2018

that amount. But demand has outstripped even these impres-

sive improvements, and now the industry needs a new gen-
eration of technology to feed the ­bandwidth-hungry beast.
The upcoming Los Angeles–to–Hong Kong cable, called the
Pacific Light Cable N
­ etwork, is spearheading that new gener-
ation. ­“Subsea cables represent the pinnacle of optical trans-
mission expertise, not in terms of capacity but in terms of
capacity-reach product,” says Geoff Bennett, director of solu-
tions and technology at Sunnyvale, Calif.–based Infinera Corp.,
which makes terminal equipment for cables. Transoceanic
cables run thousands of kilometers between landing points,
so what really counts for them is data rate times distance. And
judged in those terms, the Pacific Light Cable—reaching a third
of the way around the world—will set a record.

Such great distances are challenging in a submarine

cable because optical amplifiers are required every 50 km
or so to boost signal strength. Those amplifiers add noise,
which then builds up along the length of the cable. Sophisti-
cated signal processing can extract the signal from the accu-
mulated noise, but the process isn’t perfect, which is why
the achievable data rate drops with the length of the cable.
The current transpacific record is held by the Faster Cable,
made by NEC and owned by a consortium including Google
and five Asian telecommunication carriers (China Mobile
International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit Commu-
nications, KDDI, and Singtel). That cable stretches 9,000 km,
between Oregon and Japan, with an extension to Taiwan.
Its six fiber pairs each carry 100-Gb signals at 100 different
wavelengths, making for a total two-way carrying capacity
of 60 terabits per second.
As is standard in the industry, Faster went into operation
in 2016 with only some of its 12 fibers carrying live traffic.
But demand was high, so “Faster filled up real fast,” Bennett In principle, you can combine both strategies. Fibers that
says. No wonder planners at Pacific Light Data Communi- contain separate cores that can each transmit using several
cation of Hong Kong had already decided to provide more modes have been tested in the lab, but the process requires
bandwidth for the Pacific Light Cable. The question they sophisticated equipment, and this approach is expected to
faced was how to do that. be costly if and when it’s ultimately deployed in the field.
One approach is to multiply the number of paths carry- A much simpler option is to use many separate fibers,
ing the optical signals. A cutting-edge technique to do that, either bundled in a single cable or split among a number of
still confined to the lab, is to use fibers that contain many them. But time-tested designs for transoceanic cables can
light-guiding cores so multiple optical signals could liter- handle only a limited number of fiber pairs with their long
ally run in parallel. Another avenue to high bandwidth is chains of power-hungry amplifiers.
to make fiber cores large enough for light signals to follow The Pacific Light Cable Network adopted yet another strategy
several different paths through the same fiber. If the core is to increase carrying capacity: It ventured into a new optical
the right size and composition, the light carrying the differ- band. That’s because the Faster Cable had gone as far as was
TE Connectivity SubCom (2)

ent signals crisscrosses but doesn’t interact. But this tactic
requires optical transmitters and receivers able to get light
into and out of the core at just the right angles to keep the
different signals in separate modes. And like the multicore
approach, this technique is still being developed.
practically possible in transmitting signals in the conventional,
or C, band, which ranges in wavelength from 1,530 to 1,565
nanometers. But engineers at Pacific Light Data Communica-
tions’ cable supplier, TE SubCom, in Eatontown, N.J., opened
up an additional transmission band at wavelengths between

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01.TopTech18.Cable.NA.indd 38 12/14/17 9:03 AM

 ALL WOUND UP: Spools of optical fibers [left] are
arrayed at TE SubCom’s manufacturing facility in
Newington, N.H. Within each cable, those fibers
are surrounded by plastic and metal [inset].
1,570 and 1,610 nm, called the L (for long) band.
Using both the C and L bands, along with other
improvements, doubled the cable’s total capacity.
Previously, it had been easier in most situ-
ations to refine C-band technology than to
combine the C and L bands, says Neal Bergano,
vice president and chief technology officer at
TE SubCom. But with systems coming within
a factor of two of the theoretical capacity limit,
he and his colleagues decided it was time to
open a new band. “There is about 5 terahertz
of usable bandwidth in the C band, and you can
double that by adding the L band, to get a total
bandwidth of about 10 THz,” says Bergano.
The optical amplifiers used for these trans-
missions have limited bandwidth, so a second amplifier has
to be added in parallel for operation in the L band. Fortu-
nately, the required L-band amplifiers are essentially varia-
tions on C-band amplifiers and use the same raw material,
erbium, to amplify different wavelengths. So good lasers
and optical amplifiers were available for L-band transmit-
ters. Still, it was no small matter to do the rigorous engineer-
ing to make this C+L scheme work.
In April 2016, at the SubOptic conference in Dubai,
TE SubCom reported that a single fiber transmitting both
the C and L bands could carry 49.3 Tb/s through 9,100 km
of cable, at least under laboratory conditions. This approach
needed separate optical amplifiers for the two bands but
could use essentially the same fibers and cable designs as
were being deployed in C-band systems. The developers
said they could squeeze 20 extra wavelength channels into
each band in a practical system that could carry 24 Tb/s per
01.TopTech18.Cable.NA.indd 39
fiber through 12,500 km of cable—an impressive accomplish-
ment. Six months later, TE SubCom announced that it had
received a contract to build the Pacific Light Cable.
In addition to the C+L approach it was pioneering, TE ­SubCom
also made improvements in how the data gets encoded, fur-
ther boosting throughput. At the OFC last March, it reported
sending 70.4 Tb/s per fiber in both the C and L bands through
7,600 km of cable. Just six months later, at the European Con-
ference on Optical Communications, it reported using differ-
ent coding to send 51.5 Tb/s through 17,107 km of cable, setting
a laboratory record for the bit rate–distance product.
Adding the L band was clearly a big win, so it’s natural to
wonder whether it will be possible to add still other optical
bands to submarine cables. Alas, developers hold out little
hope for that in the near term. “Murphy wasn’t looking when
the C band came along,” jokes Bergano, because everything
worked remarkably well. Erbium-based optical amplifiers are
powerful and almost perfectly match the wavelength near
1,550 nm where optical fibers experience the least loss. The
L band is almost as good, but other fiber transmission bands
are poorly suited for transoceanic cables because of limitations
in the available lasers, amplifiers, or the fiber material itself.
Why not just make the cable thicker so that you can stuff in
more fibers? The problem is power. “Modern submarine cables
are limited by the electrical supply power you can launch at
the two ends of the cable,” says Peter Winzer of Nokia Bell Labs.
Terrestrial cables can carry hundreds of fiber strands because
the optical amplifiers they contain can tap local power sources
dotted along the way, but transoceanic submarine cables
can draw power only from their ends. And every fiber in a
10,000‑km transpacific cable needs as many as 200 optical
amplifiers per band spaced out along the way, each of which
requires energy to operate. That, and the amount of power
you can send over intercontinental distances, limits undersea
cables typically to eight fiber pairs at most.
How then will future subsea cables meet the ever-­increasing
demands for bandwidth without people having to lay more
of them in parallel? One tactic is to divide long cables into
shorter, island-hopping segments, which could offer more
bandwidth by virtue of the power that could be injected
at the junction points. But that’s not attractive to Internet
giants, which want direct, low-latency routes between their
data centers. Another technique is to stretch the spacing
between amplifiers, sacrificing bandwidth somewhat in
each fiber to reduce power consumption, which then allows
more fibers to be included in the cable. Such cutting-edge
schemes and other fresh approaches should help to satisfy
the voracious data appetites of Facebook, Google, and the
other tech giants—at least for a while. —Jeff Hecht
↗ Post your comments at http://spectrum.ieee.org/transpacificcable0118
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