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American Officials Say No Sabotage In Baltic Sea

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 CNN reports that two American government officials say the most likely explanation for the outages is simple irresponsible behavior by a Chinese cargo ship dragging its anchor. This contrasts sharply with German and Finnish officials who have insisted on sabotage. My own take is that the Americans are right. Nothing about the sabotage hypothesis is convincing.  There is no recorded incident of state sabotage of subsea cables since the end of WWII.  Fishing boats and cargo ships dragging their anchors are responsible for 70% of outages with the balance due to events such as debris slides in subsea canyon, loss of power, subsea earthquakes going mudslides, etc. Historical data provides no examples of state targeting of subsea fibre optic infrastructure. Most subsea cables are buried 1 to 2 meters deep to prevent damage. So locating them is difficult even for cable repair ships. Repair of the subsea cable SWM5 was delayed several weeks because the ship could not locate the cable which ha
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European Subsea Cable Association Gently Rebukes Hysteria Surrounding Baltic Sea Outages

"Two subsea cables located in the Baltic Sea have recently reported faults. BCS East-West cable reportedly experienced a fault at 08:00 on Sunday 17th November and the C-Lion cable reportedly experienced a fault at 02:00 on Monday 18th November (times UTC).  There has been speculation and opinion shared on social media and from news outlets as to the causes of these two subsea cable faults. Many commentators have pointed towards deliberate action. However, at this stage there is no evidence to make any conclusive statement. Particularly since the Nord Stream Pipeline was damaged in 2022, the security of critical undersea infrastructure has been a central topic of discussion, and action, for both industry and government. For these and future incidents it is prudent to consider the following: -       The primary causes of cable damage in Northern European waters are commercial fishing or ship anchors, with a smaller proportion of faults caused by natural hazards (seafl
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Southern Cross Subsea Cable Network Deploys Ciena's Granular Layer 1 Wavelength Product

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Southern Cross subsea cable system is implementing ODUflex, which is a relatively new ITU standard that allows granular Layer 1 bandwidth. No longer are we limited to 100G, 400G, and 800G for either subsea or terrestrial networks. Interestingly enough, Hauwei proposed the new standard and was its primary champion. All wavelengths consist of optical containers and ODUflex allows optical containers to be stacked at 1.25 Gps intervals. So you can lease 1.25 Gbps wavelength up to 400G in 1.25 Gbps increments. Note that port sizes are still 10G, 100G, 400G or 800G. So to access a 150G transmission rate the customer needs 400G intefaces. Ciena is one of the the vendors to implement ODUflex along with Hauwei. More details here: https://lnkd.in/dZvNbubc. It is worth noting that granular bandwidth is being implemented on the newer cables which Southern Cross owns like Next.  The commercial motivation is poor take up of 400G wavelengths. The only real customers for 400Gs are very big bandwidth
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C-Lion Cable Down

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C-Lion Cable Down In Baltic Sea C-Lion is an 8 fibre pair high capacity linear cable that went live in 2016. Transmission rate is 144 Tbps. The cable connects Helsinki data centers to Frankfurt via a cable traversing the Baltic Sea. C-Lion lands at Rostock, Germany, and at Helsinki. The Finnish government financed, owns, and operates the subsea network in the national interest. One goal of the project was to reduce network dependence on third country transit via Sweden or the Baltics. Another was to provide enough capacity to grow the Finnish data center market.  Finland offers many advantages for large data centers. Its cool climate dramatically lowers cooling costs as well as extending server life spans. There is also attractively priced, reliable, and abundant power in the form of hydro, nuclear, and wind. I think the large Google data center in Hamina, Finland opened the government's eyes to the economic potential that subsea capacity unlocks. Indeed, Google announced just a fe
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Firmina Cable, Google, & Cirion

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Google's Firmina cable is a 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable that connects its Myrtle Beach CLS in South Carolina to Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina. Firmina was one of Brazil's first notable writers and novelists. The cable is on the verge of RFS with the wet segments done and the focus on securing back haul, equipment installation, and testing. Design capacity is 240 Tbps. The cable is open. This means each fibre pair or spectrum owner selects the Layer 1 technology vendor such as Ciena or Infinera. Hence Firmina is technology agnostic. This reflects the fact that subsea optical amplifiers are compatible with all DWDM manufacturers and hence there is no compelling reason for capacity owners to chose the same terminal equipment. The main reason for doing so was the consortium model where a single operating entity was created to manage the physical assets on behalf of the members. But this model lead to conservative, status quo decision making. Google and the ot
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Trieste: A Candidate Telecom Subsea Cable Hub

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Several data centre companies have asked for my thoughts on potential data centre sites that could exploit nearby subsea cable landings. Obviously there is a need for a new data centre in Marseille diverse to the Interxion sites. In fact, Telehouse Europe has such a plan, already has purchased a plot of land, and has LOIs from long haul carriers to bring it online. Quadrivium is retrofitting a former corporate data facility in Genoa to leverage 2Africa, Blue Raman, and the other cables that call it their home.  Trieste is my nomination for a future cable landing station and Internet gateway. The city has a large port that could easily accommodate subsea cables. Furthermore, the latency of an intercontinental subsea network landing in Trieste and delivering traffic to Milano, Zurich, Vienna, and Frankfurt is definitely lower than routing via Marseille and even Genoa. So Trieste offers diversity without a latency penalty for central Europe and Scandinavia.  Trieste was a great port city
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Eastern Light Nordic Subsea Project Becomes A Distressed Asset

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The private credit company P Capital Partners has ousted this ambitious project's founders and seized control. It appears P Capital extended a loan to finance Eastern Light back in 2021. As is standard, the debt covenants probably included the right to oust management and become the company's owner if certain conditions were not met. The new owners specialize in offering high interest rate, loans so that companies can avoid equity dilution. According to the company's press release, prior management was unable to meet the key requirement of new equity financing. Hence they were fired. It is important to understand how these greenfield projects work. Generally, founders invest money in the project as equity. Since these projects are unlikely to generate cash flow for many years, equity is the appropriate financing. The project is high risk and can only be justified if there are high returns.  Banks and other credit providers generally finance projects that already are genera
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