Home » NEC to build transatlantic fibre-optic cable for Facebook

NEC to build transatlantic fibre-optic cable for Facebook

by Liam Turner
A subsea fibre-optic cable

NEC has revealed that it is to build an ultra-high performance transatlantic subsea fibre-optic cable for Facebook.

Connecting the USA and Europe, the cable will comprise 24 fibre pairs and repeaters, a system that can deliver a maximum transmission capacity of a half Petabit per second – the highest to date for a long distance repeatered optical subsea cable system.

Until recently, subsea cables have been composed of 16 fibre pairs at most.

International data usage across the Atlantic is expected to expand twenty-fold between 2021 and 2035.

NEC has been a leading supplier of submarine cable systems for more than 50 years, and has built more than 300,000km of cable, which can span the earth nearly eight times.

NEC’s subsidiary OCC Corporation manufactures subsea optical cables capable of withstanding water pressures at ocean depths beyond 8,000 meters.

Image: Christoph Burgstedt/Shutterstock


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