Cost-Optimized Submarine Cables Using Massive Spatial Parallelism

We study the techno-economics of submarine systems constrained by a fixed electrical power supply. We show significant cost savings for high-capacity submarine systems using massive space-division multiplexing (SDM), even without assuming any savings from SDM-specific subsystem integration. Systems with about 100 parallel optical paths, e.g., ~50 fiber pairs are shown to provide minimum cost/bit, ...