Ciena Upgrades Subsea Cable Throughput for Meta, Lightstorm

By Joe O’Halloran, Computer Weekly
March 25, 2026

After a claimed world record in subsea transmission, delivering 800 Gbps on a single wavelength across the trans-Pacific Bifrost Cable System, optical connectivity provider Ciena’s technology has been used by cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) network infrastructure platform Lightstorm to quadruple client service capacity of its Japan-Guam-Australia (JGA) submarine cable system.

The comapny stated that work on the Bifrost Cable System forms a milestone that shows how hyperscalers are scaling them for the next wave of global compute – that is, hyperscalers require submarine infrastructure to support the vast datasets needed for AI training and global cloud services.

Together in their trial, Ciena and Meta said they set a new world record in achieving unregenerated single-carrier 800 Gb/s across the 16,608 kilometre-long transpacific submarine cable, delivering high-performance terrestrial and subsea connectivity spanning from Singapore to California. Based on Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) coherent optics, the project is said to redefine capacity, efficiency and sustainable global connectivity at a global scale.

Ciena regards the achievement as reinforcing the “800G everywhere” value of WL6e, demonstrating that ultra-high-capacity wavelengths can perform reliably across the longest and most demanding subsea routes. The trial delivered 18 Tbps of total fibre pair capacity with excess operating margin to spare, housed in a Submarine Line Terminal Equipment (SLTE) footprint of 10 rack units (RU). This is said to provide a 50% reduction in watts/bit when compared with the previous generation of coherent modems.

In addition to regarding the results as “exceptional” from a scale perspective, Ciena said they are “remarkable” in terms of space and power efficiency – a critical advantage in subsea landing stations where every rack unit and watt matters.

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