Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The private equity firm Cerberus has taken a majority equity stake in Datawave Networks, a Cyprus-based subsea cable developer. Datawave's key project is to deploy a linear 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable linking UAE, Oman, Mumbai, Chennai, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Datawave began this project in 2019 when the company was incorporated. But due to the increasing dominance of American Tech Giants, investors have been reluctant to fund private wholesale network operators. It is simply seen as too risky given lack of hyperscaler demand for leased subsea network capacity. Due to the Cerberus acquisition, SING is now fully funded with Subcom expected to complete the project in 2030. I believe part of what drove Cerberus' interest in this project was the Red Sea bottleneck. While building Marseille to Singapore would be viewed as too risky given the required capital, linking the new subsea cable hub of Oman to Singapore seems like a...

Blue Origin is a Jeff Bezos' startup providing space services to NASA and other clients. Those services include cargo delivery, rocket engines, lunar landing vehicles, and under development, a commercial space station. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket carries as much cargo as SpaceX' Starship and successfully launched a NASA probe in late 2025. The first stage is reusable.  New Glenn's success has encouraged Blue Origin to develop new satellite constellations. The company announced yesterday a hybrid network of 5,280 LEO and 128 MEO satellites called Terawave that will use dual free space lasers and radio frequencies to communicate with the Earth. Radio frequency will provide a minimum committed bit rate of 144 Gibabits per second, many magnitudes greater than what Starlink offers, with free space lasers boosting the throughput by 6 terabits in ideal weather conditions. Dual connectivity is not a new idea. Low latency financial trading platforms have been using microwave ...

EUNetworks offers standard VLAN services for connectivity to public clouds and data centers and also standalone dedicated Ethernet private line. The Ethernet private line is a dedicated service and port product. It is fully protocol transparent. All Ethernet lines are MPLS protected by default. While the primary path is static, the protect path is dynamic. Circuit restoration varies from 50 milliseconds to to a few hundred milliseconds depending on routing. Bandwidth is highly granular. It ranges from 10 megabits to 100 gigabits. Ethernet private line is ideal for companies and governments because the MPLS protection core includes so many routing paths that downtime is extremely limited. EUNetworks has thousands of Ethernet-enabled Layer 2 sites in Western Europe. Approximately a 100 sites allow for provisioning in a few minutes. APIs are available for ordering and monitoring service. Routing options include point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and multipoint to multipo...

The cable ship has repaired one fault, but discovered at least one other fault in shallow water. Repair of the second fault begins soon.

Amazon's North American fibre optic network below. Its global network consists of nine million kilometers of owned fibre pairs. Amazon spent the last year experimenting with hollow core fibre and is now ready to join Microsoft in long haul deployments. See their blog for more setails:  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-insights/building-resilience-inside-awss-nine-million-kilometers-of-fiber-optic-cabling/. Microsoft has deployed hollow core fibre in the long haul to connect three AI data centres. It owns the leading hollow core manufacturer and research company, Lumenisity.  New hollow core designs unveiled in a recent Nature Photonics paper have solved the main obstacle to long haul deployment, namely high attenuation. High attenuation simply means light pulses fade rapidly and hence require frequent amplification. In contrast, Luminisity's new hollow core design unveiled in the Nature publication has 50% less attenuation than standard fibre. This means it can be incorpor...

Estonia is a small Baltic nation with 1.4 million inhabitants. It has eight subsea fibre optic cables plus several power interconnectors. It is a large number given its land mass and population. Over the last several years Baltic Sea outages have been frequent with many in the Nordics pointing their finger at Russia. Many of these outages have involved cables landing in Estonia. However, the Baltic Sea is extremely shallow. Its average depth is 52 to 55 meters. So cables in these waters are extremely vulnerable to fishing vessels and cargo ships dragging anchors. If they are not buried deeply in protected sea lanes, damage is inevitable. The other factor is the Russia shadow fleet. Europe is weaning itself off Russian gas imports with the figure falling from 8 billion cubic meters per month in early 2022 to 2 billion cubic meters today. When the war began, sanctions forced European headquartered global shipping lines to either stop serving Russia or place restrictions on acc...