NEC Corporation has won a contract from Facebook to build transatlantic subsea fiber-optic cable connecting the USA and Europe.

NEC said its 24 fiber pair cable and repeaters will enable customers to achieve 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 cable was composed of 16 fiber pairs at most.

International data usage across the Atlantic is expected to grow 20-fold in the 15 years between 2021 and 2035. The region ranks among the highest growth geographies for data traffic demand, bringing ever-greater demands to reduce the cost per bit on subsea cable networks.

NEC, a leading supplier of submarine cable systems, has built more than 300,000 km of cable, spanning the earth nearly 8 times.

NEC is well known for the manufacture and installation of optical submarine cables and repeaters, provision of ocean surveys and route designs, training and delivery testing.

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