Colt CEO on AI, acquisitions and industry firsts for subsea fiber

Subsea communications have been available for decades, but recently there have been major breakthroughs in the technology.

In November, Colt and Ciena announced the first 1.2 Tbit/s wavelength transmission across the Atlantic Ocean. It occurred over Colt's Grace Hopper subsea cable using Ciena's 1.6T coherent technology, WaveLogic 6 Extreme. The Grace Hopper cable is one of ten subsea cables and 12 landing stations that Colt acquired from its acquisition of Lumen EMEA in November 2023.

Keri Gilder, CEO of Colt, joins the Light Reading podcast to explain the significance of that optical network milestone.

"We did the first terabit transmission with Ciena. To me, it's substantial because a lot of companies and a lot of people still think that a lot of communication is done over wireless and the airways," says Gilder. "The reality is that more than 90% of communications are done over fiber and fiber cables, specifically, connecting continents like the ones in the Atlantic."

In the trial, Colt was able to double wavelength capacity and reduce power consumption by 50% compared to earlier generation coherent technology.

During the podcast, Gilder explains how Colt's acquisition of Lumen's EMEA business has impacted its own network.

"Colt was the largest B2B service provider in Europe and Lumen EMEA was the second largest provider in Europe. The combination of the two makes us by far the largest provider in Europe," says Gilder. "We are your B2B provider if you want to cross country territories within Europe and we're also you're B2B provider transatlantic because of the cables and two landing stations with backhaul that we have in North America."

Gilder also discusses how AI is changing customers' network traffic and bandwidth needs. However, among the challenges to expanding AI applications, particularly in Europe, are power consumption and data privacy concerns which need to be addressed, she says.