Meridian-1 is Current’s flagship transatlantic system and the backbone of our North Atlantic capacity portfolio. It runs a direct great-circle route from a purpose-built beach manhole in Manasquan, New Jersey to our landing station in Bude, Cornwall — the same stretch of Cornish coastline that has hosted transatlantic cable landings since the telegraph era, chosen again here for its stable seabed geology and short onward path to European interconnection points in London and Slough.
The system carries 16 fiber pairs on a single trunk, each fitted with C+L-band optical amplification, giving a total design capacity of 480 Tbps once every pair is fully lit — roughly triple the per-fiber-pair capacity of the transatlantic systems built a decade earlier, a direct result of using modern space-division-multiplexed cable and coherent optics rated for 800G-per-wavelength transponders at commissioning rather than upgrading into an older cable design.
Route engineering kept Meridian-1 south of the primary shipping lanes and fishing grounds that have historically produced the highest fault rates on this crossing, and the cable is buried to a minimum 1.5-meter trench depth across the entire continental shelf on both ends — the zone where anchor strikes and bottom-trawling gear cause the overwhelming majority of subsea cable faults. In the abyssal plain, where burial isn’t practical, the cable relies on double-armored construction instead.
Meridian-1 is wholly owned and operated by Current, sold as lit wavelength services, dark fiber IRUs, and — for two of its sixteen pairs — as a fully private allocation to a single hyperscale customer under a long-term capacity agreement.
