Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1654

No, they are just running the system below the capacity of the actual fiber and repeaters. They seem to use OC192 (10G) x 16 colours, and to only use one of the three available colour bands in the fiber. Probably because that is a lot more than what they are able to sell. The market for these things collapsed in 2000, and hasn't recovered much.

We deployed the identical technology in Qwest and KPNQwest at the time. (OK, shorter spans, but not by much). We rolled out OC48 and OC192 (STM16-STM64) and used standard WDM units of 16 colours, leaving whole colour bands vacant.

But we verified that it was able to run OC768 x 40, and OC192 x 80. Some propaganda links using that technology was deployed. Qwest made one such link NYC-LA as part of the IP backbone; and KQ made a link Amsterdam-Frankfurt. Totally saturated the routers at each end.

I guess around 40 gigabits should be able to cover the total transatlantic internet capacity for the time being. The restriction for that is what the local networks in each end is able to absorb.

I know of no router that is able to push more than 10 gigabit-sec on a single interface anyway; and that would be closer to half that with actual internet traffic patterns.

WDM equipment is quite expensive, cumbersome and bulky, so I don't see it deployed on a chip sometime soon.

-- mrr