Submarine cable networks

Abstract

The wavelength division multiplexing technique enabled to increase drastically the transmission capacity per fiber over trans-Atlantic distances: from 1 × 5 Gbit/s in 1995, the figure increases up to 42 × 10 Gbit/s in 2001 and today, transmission systems providing up to 160 × 10 Gbit/s are under development. This evolution results mainly from the optical amplification bandwidth increase and the reduction of the spectral variation of the fiber chromatic dispersion. In un-repeatered submarine system, the distributed Raman amplification has been a key technology enabling a 160 ×10 Gbit/s transmission over a 380 km single fiber.

A Wired World: The Evolving Geography of Submarine Cables and the Shift to Asia

“…The $47,103 of TAT-7 in 1983 was 3.8 percent of the cost of TAT-1 in 1956; however, fiber-optic technology has had greater impact: The investment cost per circuit of recent trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific cables is less than 1 percent that of cables installed in the late 1980s. Cable links are no longer point-to-point but self-healing rings including at least two landing points at each end, providing integrated networks and a thousand-fold capacity increase in eight years over a transoceanic distance (Trischitta and Marra 1998;Gautheron and Suyama 2003). Reinforced by this freefall in pricing, fiber-optic cables have become the preferred means of international communication (Chesnoy and Jerpahagnon 2002).…”

Submarine networks: evolution, not revolution

“…x 0 e −y 2 dy and I 1 (I 0 ) is the mark (space) electrical level. In practice, the transmission quality is expressed through the Q factor deduced from the measured BER by the formula (1).…”

“…zero (NRZ) or return-to-zero (RZ) format. In some cases, phase modulation was added in a non-information bearing way on top of these OOK modulation: this is the case for the chirped return to zero (CRZ) format that has been widely deployed in the 10 Gb/s WDM systems between 1995 and 2001 [1]. Table 1 gives the highest capacity of ultra long haul system (longer than 6000 km) deployed until 2007.…”

“…It should be underlined that Apollo and China-USA used conventional Non-Zero-Dispersion-Shifted Fiber (NZDSF) while TGN Pacific was the sole link deployed before 2007 with Dispersion-Slope-Matched fiber (DSMF) [2]. Note that in [1], the DSMF was named DSCF for Dispersion-Slope-Compensated Fiber.…”

“…Although we mentioned in [1] potential evolution in submarine optical amplification based on Raman amplification or C + L band EDFA, none of these techniques have been implemented. Moreover, the submarine systems deployed until 2007 did not offer more capacity then those deployed in 2003.…”