Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

I got an instant message from an Australian ISP late yesterday my time saying my information was out-of-date and that the cable was almost completely repaired. Indigo West is now passing traffic. "We are pleased to confirm that all three faults affecting the Indigo West cable system have now been fully repaired and resolved, with services restored and stable. A summary of the faults, including their locations and resolution status, is provided below: • Fault #1 – A Fibre break in Indonesian Waters that was successfully repaired on 19/01/2026. • Fault #2 – A Partial fibre break off the coast of Perth in shallow waters that was confirmed successfully repaired on 10/02/2026 at 10:57 UTC. • Fault #3 – A shunt fault in Indonesian Waters approximately 380-410km away from Fault #1 location, inland towards Singapore was successfully repaired on 03/02/2026. All traffic has been restored and services are now operating normally. We will continue to monitor the Indigo West closel...

Logos Space is a new LEO satellite provider that plans to put over four thousand LEO birds into seven orbital shells in the 870 to 920 kilometer span above the Earth. Logos is taking an unusual approach. Its target market includes businesses and governments, but excludes households. Instead of Internet, Logos offers highly secure Layer 2 MPLS Ethernet services. These are the core products, not transit. To improve security over traditional satellite services, it is operating in the high frequency V and E spectrum bands along with the lower frequency K band. This enables the use of narrow beams to connect the customer premise equipment to a satellite. These narrow beams are much more difficult to intercept for eavesdropping or jamming.  Most LEO constellations provide exclusively Layer 3 services. Satellite frequency spectrum is a finite, strictly limited resource. So overbooked or oversubscribed transit has been the only service that traditionally made economic sense. N...

Teset Capital is financing a $100 million, 12 fibre pair cable directly linking Valencia, Spain to Genoa, Italy. The network includes POPs in Madrid, Valencia, Genoa, and Milano. It is a remarkably high capacity system designed for 32 Tbps per fibre pair. This implies a 384 Tbps aggregate transmission rate. The cable will land at Sparkle's Genoa CLS and also at a carrier neutral CLS in Valencia. This cable is part of a bigger project. Teset along with two other investment groups owns both the Barracuda cable and the affiliated Valencia Digital Port Connect Project. The project includes the Valencia cable landing station where Barracud will land as well as a nearby data center.  A social media post suggests that Sparkle has acquired fibre pair capacity on the wet segment. It also suggests Sparkle is providing or selling backhaul services. Details are important. If Sparkle is providing lit Layer 1 services to Madrid and Milano, then the project is unlikely to suceed. End-to-end cost ...

I build low energy homes. One of the best building insulators are vacuum insulated panels, which have a dense core of fiber glass from which all gases been removed. Any vacuum, like space, eliminates the convection and conduction of heat. Hence the only way for heat to flow is via thermal radiation. But thermal radiation is long wavelength. In other words, it doesn't carry a lot of energy. Hence thermal radiation is low intensity, and consequently, the radiating object cools very slowly. An object at 20 degrees placed in outer space will only radiate 500 watts per square meter of surface area. The temperature falls one centigrade every three to four minutes. Not exactly like the science fiction depictions where someone is ejected from an air lock and freezes instantaneously.  On earth we use convection to dissipate heat. Air and water are the usual media. This is just much more efficient than radiation will ever be. For more details on the woes of cooling orbital data centers click...

 Amazon LEO is showing the world that the satellite wars are just beginning. A recurring Silicon Valley theme has been that Starlink has a long term global monopoly on LEO telecommunication services. In fact, the term is 'global public utility'. Starlink supposedly has scale advantages and benefits from an insurmountable cost edge due to vertical integration in the form of satellite manufacturing and launching services. This is of course sheer hogwash. While SpaceX has a cost edge right now, it has no technology moat to preserve an edge long term over the rest of the industry. There is no patent barrier to creating a reusable launch vehicle. Several players including Blue Origin and the Chinese are close to perfecting reusable rockets. Just like Starlink, LEO is manufacturing its own satellites and its per unit costs are steadily falling. AT&T has agreed to migrate computer work loads to AWS with some of it involving Amazon's Outpost service. This involves Amazon provid...

A point: Most Mumbai carrier neutral data centres. Z point: SG5, Singapore. Term: 3 Years. MRC: $38K. NRC: $20K. Customer responsible for cross connects.