Facebook's
subsea cable subsidary, Edge Cable Holdings, has petitioned the FCC to
land a new cable at the NJIX data center in Wall Township, New Jersey.
The cable lands in Europe at an Arelion owned facility in Blaabjerg,
Denmark. META uses both NJIX and the Arelion facility for the power feed
equipment, but is installing the submarine line termination equipment,
which includes the lasers and electronics at a Piscataway carrier
neutral data center and its Danish counterpart, an unnamed Esbjerg site.
There are two huge data centers in Esbjerg.
Facebook
currently owns two fiber pairs on the consortium AEC-2 subset network
linking the US and Denmark. AEC-2 has exactly the same end points as
Aurora. Hyperscaler traffic has grown so rapidly that consortium
membership in many cases simply makes no economic sense. Most
hyperscalers need all the capacity that a cable provides and hence sole
ownership as emerged as the most economic business model.
We
know very little about Aurora given the confidentially restrictions on
the FCC application. It is a 24 fibre pair network designed to transmit
497 terabits per second. This makes it the highest capacity Trans-Atlantic in
operation and the new record holder. Anjana was the first half petabit
cable at 480 Tbps. Aurora narrowly edges it out in design capacity.
