Xtera has been selected by EXA Infrastructure to provide optical engineering and the wet and dry plant for EXA Meridian, a planned transatlantic subsea cable between New Jersey in the United States and Brean in the UK. The system is designed with 24 fibre pairs and more than 500Tbps of scalable capacity.
EXA Infrastructure says the cable will run for approximately 6,552km and is scheduled to be ready for service in 2029, while Xtera is targeting the fourth quarter of that year for the system to go live. The project has reached contract-in-force status with Xtera, moving it from route planning into a defined supply and engineering programme.
Xtera’s package covers both the submerged and shore-based elements required to operate the optical system. The wet plant encompasses equipment deployed in the marine environment, while the dry plant covers terminal and associated equipment on land. Optical engineering has to connect those elements around the required reach, capacity, power and resilience of the complete route.
The cable will connect through a new landing station at Brean before using diverse terrestrial backhaul routes to Slough and EXA Infrastructure’s wider pan-European backbone. Capacity arriving on the Somerset coast therefore forms only one part of the network. The terrestrial section has to carry traffic onwards to data centres, cloud platforms, carriers, financial networks and research infrastructure without creating a single inland bottleneck.
EXA describes Meridian as the ninth transatlantic cable in its portfolio and the first transatlantic system built by a single operator in a decade. EXA is leading delivery, with Xtera supplying a substantial portion of the optical system rather than owning the route itself.
The 24-fibre-pair design reflects a market in which the largest capacity buyers increasingly procure spectrum or complete fibre pairs rather than relying only on individual wavelengths from an operator. EXA links that demand to AI, cloud computing and distributed data-centre architectures that are increasing traffic between North America and Europe.
Additional fibre pairs provide greater flexibility to allocate capacity among large customers, but pair count alone does not determine commercial throughput. Terminal technology, spectrum allocation, route engineering, repeater performance and operating margins all shape how much of the cable’s theoretical capacity can be used in service.
More than 500Tbps of scalable capacity places Meridian among the high-capacity generation of transatlantic systems being designed for the end of the decade. The figure represents the system’s planned capability rather than traffic expected immediately at launch. Subsea capacity is normally lit progressively as terminal equipment, contracts and customer demand develop.
The engineering programme extends far beyond optical design. A transatlantic cable has to move through marine survey, cable and repeater manufacture, permitting, shore-end works, landing-station construction, installation and system testing before it can enter service. Weather, seabed conditions, fisheries, existing infrastructure and specialist vessel availability can all affect delivery.
Those constraints explain the multi-year interval between contract-in-force status and the proposed 2029 service date. Manufacturing and marine installation have limited opportunities for improvisation once cable sections enter production or a vessel begins laying the route, placing a premium on survey work, logistics and equipment availability earlier in the programme.
Brean also gives Meridian a substantial UK physical-infrastructure component. Cable landing stations require power, cooling, security, optical terminal equipment and resilient terrestrial connections, while the marine system depends on specialised cable, repeaters and installation vessels. Digital capacity is consequently built through a conventional industrial supply chain extending across factories, civil works, electrical infrastructure and marine engineering.
Xtera says its subsea systems have been deployed across more than 60 countries and that it can supply networks using turnkey or disaggregated models. EXA Meridian places that engineering capability within EXA’s existing owned network, allowing the transatlantic system to feed directly into established European routes rather than terminate as an isolated landing asset.
The contract milestone now shifts attention to physical delivery. Progress over the next three years will be measured through plant manufacture, landing-station construction, terrestrial backhaul, marine installation and system acceptance rather than additional capacity announcements.
If those stages remain on schedule, EXA Meridian will enter service with 24 fibre pairs, a direct New Jersey-to-Brean route and more than 500Tbps of scalable capacity linked into an established European backbone. The scale is considerable, but the immediate industrial task is more prosaic: manufacture, install and commission more than 6,500km of subsea infrastructure without losing the 2029 timetable.
