Faster cables, tighter budgets, and a NaaS acquisition

March 23, 2026

Good morning.

Ciena and Meta just broke a transpacific submarine cable record, Arista announced an optics module that cuts data center switch rack counts by 75%, and the refurbished networking equipment market quietly crossed $14.6B with no signs of slowing down.

As always, thank you for reading - and hit us up with any feedback.

Today's edition:

Let’s dive in.

Cato Networks put NVIDIA GPUs directly inside its SASE points of presence, which means AI-based traffic inspection now happens at the enforcement point rather than getting routed out to a separate cloud.

Arista announced XPO, a 12.8 Tbps liquid-cooled optics module that replaces eight standard OSFP modules in a single slot, cutting switch rack counts by 75% in large AI data center builds.

Meter acquired WiredScore, which certifies building connectivity standards for landlords and developers across 42 countries. Combined with Meter's existing strategy pillar of pre-installing networking infrastructure into commercial buildings, the play is to influence how a space is wired before a tenant ever moves in, a potentially lucrative play for the SMB market - who often prioritize cost and simplicity over feature density.

🇦🇪 Starlink launches services in UAE and Kuwait, expanding Middle East satellite internet (Computer Weekly)

🤖 Cisco laid out its approach to securing AI agent threats, with a focus on network management platforms as the primary trust boundary. (Cisco)

🔐 Versa extends SASE platform with Inbound SSE and Secure Enterprise Browser. (Network World)

🖥️ Nvidia unveiled its Vera Rubin platform at GTC, combining compute, networking, and data processing for large AI data centers. (Network World)

☁️ Cloud group takes Broadcom VMware fight to European regulator (SDxCentral)

⚖️ A federal judge scrutinized HPE's DOJ settlement over its $14 billion Juniper acquisition after a group of attorneys general challenged the deal. (Bloomberg)

Ciena and Meta just set a world record transmitting 800 Gb/s on a single optical wavelength across 16,608 kilometers of transpacific submarine cable, using Ciena's WaveLogic 6 Extreme coherent optics on Meta's Bifrost system connecting Singapore to the US West Coast.

The trial also hit 18 Tb/s of total fiber pair capacity in just 10 rack units, cutting watts per bit by 50% versus the previous generation.

Between the lines: Submarine cables are infrastructure that most people forget exists until something cuts one. Roughly 600 cables carry over 95% of the world's international data traffic, and they have been geopolitically contested since the 19th century telegraph era. That tension has intensified considerably: China has accelerated its own subsea investments while the US has moved to restrict Chinese involvement in cables touching American shores, and hyperscalers like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have begun building and co-owning cables directly rather than leasing capacity from carriers.

The broader read: AI is what makes this urgent. Moving training data and inference traffic across continents at scale requires sustained, low-latency, high-throughput links between data centers. Pushing 800G across existing transpacific fiber without regeneration expands how much AI traffic Meta can move between Singapore and California without laying new cable. As AI becomes the dominant driver of subsea capacity demand, the companies that can move more bits per wavelength over existing infrastructure win on both cost and time.

Read the whole story

The refurbished enterprise networking equipment market is on track to reach $35.2 billion by 2034, growing at a 9.2% annual clip.

The driver is simple. Hardware budgets are tight, lead times are long, and refurbished gear from credible vendors now ships with warranties and testing protocols that close most of the quality gap with new equipment. Organizations can cut networking hardware costs by 50 to 60% without meaningfully giving up performance. That's not a niche value proposition.

Large enterprises account for over 72% of the market, which surprises people who assume refurbished is an SMB story. It isn't. Organizations running sprawling infrastructure have the most to gain from cost-optimized procurement, and the market has matured enough to give procurement teams the reliability guarantees they need to get it past legal and finance.

The real risk is obsolescence. As networks modernize around Wi-Fi 7, 5G SA, and cloud-native architectures, refurbished gear has to keep pace or lose relevance. Refurbishers that can certify equipment against current standards will hold the market. Those pushing legacy hardware into modern environments without that rigor will slowly poison the category's credibility.

At $35 billion by 2034, this market is bigger than most people covering enterprise networking realize. It's also a decent proxy for how much pressure IT teams are actually under when it comes to capital budgets, which is probably the more useful read.

Read more on the refurbished equipment market here.