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> Modern cables are fiberoptic and do not increase their bandwidth once laid.

That's not true: The amplifiers they use work at the analog (and in fact even optical, i.e. without conversion to electric and back) level, and it's possible to upgrade capacity by only modifying the endpoints, not the entire cable.

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Well, the usable capacity of the cable increases, but the cable itself has been doing it's job perfectly all the time :P

I thought that endpoint upgrading of submarine cables was a sort of well known thing (at least amongst people that are aware their data goes and partly becomes a bunch of photons under the ocean, which I guess may be a lot of people here)

Case in point, SEA-ME-WE-3 launched with a capacity of 20gbit back in 2000. Today it's been upgraded to 4600 gbit, a 200 fold increase.

The throughput can be dramatically increased by upgrading the DWDM kit. The optical amplifiers in the water are technologically agnostic. The fibre can be a gating factor. For a while fibre with chromatic dispersion compensation was used and that actually limits the ability to upgrade the cable using modern coherent optics.

- The author.

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