Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

1 Year Term; Customer handles cross connects.

The East Asia to America cable connects Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the US. It is a standard spatial multiplexing cable with 12 fibre pairs and aggregate design throughput of 192 Tbps. Per fibre pair throughput is relatively limited 16 Tbps due to the cable's long length of 12,500 kilometers together with the lack of any intermediate power sources. E2A is an open cable so the common infrastructure is limited to the wet segment plus the power feed which is typically housed at the cable landing station. Each fibre pair and spectrum owner will install and operate their own submarine termination equipment such as the DWDM kit. Indeed, each owner is free to choose the data centers in which it terminates its capacity. The network design minimizes latency by using a main trunk from Taiwan to Moro, California with branching units to South Korea and Japan. See the map below.  This cable is interesting because to date there have been no direct South Korea to US links. This is the first. ...

 NTT is the lead consortium member on a new Indian subsea cable linking Mumbai and Chennai to Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Like most cables these days Mist is a spatial division multiplexing system. It has 12 fibre pairs with aggregate transmission capacity of 240 Tbps. The DWDM backbone is 400G. Mist is part of a new wave of high capacity, high fibre count subsea cables connecting India to Europe and Southeast Asia that also includes Blue-Raman, IEX, and IAX. Information on their transmission rates is sparse, but their collective throughput is probably at least a half petabit per second and perhaps as high as 750 Tbps. NTT spent about $400 million on the project, which is part of a bigger plan to become a major data center player in India. Indian carriers still largely dominate the local data center business although that is rapidly changing as Equinix makes a concerted push. Undoubtedly, NTT management realized that the main obstacle to thriving Indian data centers...

Looking for new long haul providers from Portugal to Madrid and beyond? I've got them. Lisbon/Madrid/Barcelona/Marseille and Madrid/Paris. These unique routes are in the gas pipeline rights of way and often include new fibre. No Colt nor EXA in the conduit systems.   Just say no to the usual suspects. A 100G wave from LS1 to other Portuguese data centers as well as Madrid is 975 Euros on a 3 year term. You will not be in the same conduit system as Colt or EXA. In fact, most of your Layer 3 upstreams are also absent so this ideal for improving network resiliency via unique physical diversity.

Hollow core transmits light via a central air filled tube in the fibre optic strand versus solid ultra-pure silicon. The benefit is 50% less latency which brings it within 1% of light's maximum speed. High attenuation bedeviled this technology's earliest incarnations as light would bleed and escape through the cladding. A founder of Lumenosity, the preeminent hollow core manufacturer, stopped light bleeding using a reflective layer made of silver. Photonic bandgaps are also used for the same purpose. The fibre offers several performance advantages over traditional solid core fibre: 1. Lower latency since light travels 50% faster via air. 2. Air generates less chromatic dispersion than glass. Chromatic dispersion involves the different frequencies making up a light pulse moving at different speeds. This causes a pulse meant to occupy one time slot to spread and occupy multiple time slots. The data is corrupted. 2. Less nonlinear distortions such as 4 wave mixing, stimulated Bril...

1. Senegal is really hard because several 2African consortium members decided to exclude it from their footprint. But subsea capacity demand is significant because Dakar is a natural telecom hub due to its location along the Northwest African coast. I am working on getting a good subsea 2Africa solution for African ISPs for whom Dakar is part of their plans. 2. If you planning to lease subsea capacity into South Africa or Lagos, best to wait a few months for 2Africa to go live. The combination of 2Africa and Equiano will create a temporary glut. That's the time to strike. 3. I recommend African consortium members on the Equiano and 2Africa cables over their foreign counterparts (Trump will be complaining I am discriminating against white people😄) because they have larger metro footprints. Metro waves are extremely expensive in African cities. It is likely that you can negotiate a subsea deal with an African carrier that eliminates or sharply diminishes any metro charges. I just di...