Comment by joha4270
5 days ago
A submarine cable is a bundle of hundreds of strands, so you need quite a few satellites to replace one cable.
5 days ago
A submarine cable is a bundle of hundreds of strands, so you need quite a few satellites to replace one cable.
Typical submarine cables at at absolute most 24 strands, more commonly 4, 6, 10 or 12 for modern ones. Terrestrial cables can easily be hundreds and that's quite mundane.
The high capacity in submarine fiber is achieved through DWDM and coherent modulation 100Gbps+ transceivers, not massive parallelism in fiber use.
Why? compared to the laying cost, an extra 10000 fibers should be pocket change
The cable contains not only the fibers, but also optical amplifiers to compensate for the losses. Even for 24 fibers, the amplifier is a substantial and expensive piece of equipment. It also requires electric power, which is not trivial to provide along the entire span between continents.
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