Technologies
The cable uses dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), allowing for increased communications capacity per fibre compared to fibres carrying non-multiplexed signals and also facilitates bidirectional communication within a single fibre. DWDM does this by multiplexing different wavelengths of laser light on a single optical fibre so that multiple optical carrier signals can be concurrently transmitted along that fibre. Two fibre pairs are used with each pair able to carry 64 carriers at 10 Gbit/s each. This enables terabit per second speeds along the SEA-WE-ME 4 cable, with a total capacity of 1.28 Tbit/s. In Feb 2011 the consortium awarded contracts to upgrade submarine segments capacity to 40 Gbit/s per link, along with landing sites equipment capable of 100 Gbit/s for future needs.
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