Thursday Bytes: AT&T, Corning, Ekinops, Meta

Fiber, vendor, and subsea news to catch up with:

AT&T became the latest telecommunications giant to ink a long term deal for its supply of fiber. They have tapped Corning in a deal worth more than $3B as they strive to meet the growing demand for fiber from the core to the last mile. According to AT&T, the average American household uses more than 1Tb per month, a number that will more than double by 2030 when the company expects it will have some 60M people connected to its last mile.

Ekinops has picked up a significant multi-year agreement out in the Midwest. Bluebird Fiber has tapped them to expand optical capacity on its core backbone. Bluebird’s footprint touches 12 states, having significantly boosted its reach through the acquisiton of Everstream earlier this year. They will be adding 400G capabilities across that footprint as they roll out more high capacity, low latency wavelengths on diverse paths through that territory.

And I missed this last week, but Meta has announced a new transatlantic cable project with an interesting twist. Petal will span 7,000km between France and the US and bring as much as 1 petabit per second of capacity. They’re doing this by deploying multi-core fiber at scale, using 2-core fiber within each of 24 fiber pairs. That lets them scale capacity without as much power or physical infrastructure. NEC and Sumitomo Electric will be helping with the construction, and Petal should be operational by 2029 if all goes well.

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