- Chokepoint (subsea)
- A narrow maritime geography, such as the waters around Taiwan or the Red Sea corridor, through which many cables are forced to pass. Concentration there means a single event can sever multiple systems at once, turning apparent diversity into correlated failure risk.
- Dark fiber
- Fiber-optic strands leased without accompanying optical equipment, so the customer supplies and operates its own transponders on each end. It transfers control of a physical path, and its capacity can be upgraded by changing only the endpoint electronics.
- Indefeasible right of use (IRU)
- A long-term, exclusive, essentially irrevocable right to use specific fiber capacity or strands, typically for 15 to 25 years, involving a large upfront payment plus an annual maintenance fee. It is the primary instrument for transferring long-term control of a route.
- Landing station
- The hardened coastal facility where a submarine cable comes ashore, is powered, and connects to terrestrial fiber, forming the hinge between subsea and land networks. Because viable landing sites are scarce and fixed, landing stations concentrate many cables at a few known points.
- Lit fiber
- Fiber capacity sold as a managed service measured in bits per second, where the carrier owns and operates the optical equipment. The customer rents transport and flexibility rather than controlling the underlying physical strand or its upgrade timeline.
- Meet-me point (interconnection facility)
- A carrier hotel or interconnection building where many networks physically cross-connect. A site's proximity to a rich meet-me point governs its pricing, routing optionality, and ability to add capacity, and is a core component of network readiness.
- Right-of-way
- The legal permission to bury and maintain fiber conduit across land along a corridor such as a railroad, pipeline, or highway. It is the scarce, durable asset underlying long-haul networks, since glass is cheap but the permitted path is expensive and hard to duplicate.
- Route diversity
- The condition in which two connectivity paths share no common point of failure, conduit, crossing, or building entrance, so no single event can sever both. Verified by a path-separation study, it is distinct from merely buying two separate commercial circuits.