Lighthouse R&D Enterprises, Inc. offers a telecommunications service that will support up to 32, 2.5 Gb/s data streams for use by our customers. This provides a total capacity of 80 Gb/s. For maximum reliability and availability, each 2.5 Gb/s stream operates on a pair of transmission channels traveling in opposite directions on the network. Smart terminals located both at shore terminals and on customer facilities transparently respond to any system failure by providing loop-back on the oppositely-directed channel. In addition, these terminals dynamically balance traffic loads in the two directions to provide optimum user capacity.

Each 2.5 Gb/s stream is carried on one optical wavelength (lambda) on an optical fiber. Each fiber supports eight lambdas and two fibers are used to provide the two directions for a channel. That is, 0.1 travels in one direction on fiber A, while the same wavelength, 0.1, travels in the opposite direction on fiber B. Thus a fiber-pair carries one 2.5 Gb/s channel on one wavelength. Eight channels can be carried on each fiber-pair (Wavelength Division Multiplexing, WDM) so four fiber-pairs are used on the main trunk for the data channels. With appropriate underwater amplification, system lengths can exceed 5,000 km. The total number of customers who may be served is determined by the total data needs and the system data capacity.