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2Africa Update - Cable Landings Stations, Capacity Availability & POPs - Part 1

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1. 2Africa is vastly superior to the older African cables in cost, performance, and footprint. It has 9x the capacity of WACS or ACE. Cross connects are capped at $150 per month at the CLS and most hand offs are at carrier neutral facilities. The cable is buried 2 meters in deep in shallow coastal waters (1000 meters or less in depth) versus 1 meter or less for older systems. It bypasses all known danger spots such as subsea canyons with their debris slides. 2. Sénégal A. ONIX is the main 2Africa POP in Dakar. Note that consortium members are free to place their SLTEs where they desire in Dakar. So other sites may also be on-net. The Dakar CLS just houses the power feed equipment. B. ONIX just opened its doors to customers so expect 2Africa service to begin near year's end. C Sénégal is a significant challenge for capacity buyers because at least one major consortium player elected to skip it. D. I have great 100G pricing for the LS1 to ONIX route at $17.5K a month on a 1 year term...
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Middle East Subsea Cable Outage Update

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A. Three cables have lost their Dubai connectivity: EIG, TATA Gulf, and IMEWE. EIG is depicted in the top panel. It goes as far West as London. IMEWE lands at Marseille. Finally, TATA Gulf is a branch of TGN-EA. B. EIG uses a branching unit to split into a subsidiary trunk that goes up the Persian gulf and a main trunk to Europe. Hence the main trunk is probably ok. The same comment applies to TGN-EA and IMEWE.
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The Coherent Optics Revolution: Transcending The 10G Wavelength Barrier

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 The Coherent Optics Revolution: Transcending 10G Wavelengths - Part 1 The first stage of optical communication was dominated by what Mark Tinka called the simple optical detection scheme. A pulse of laser light represented a '1' and no light meant a '0' or vice versa. Cisco white papers call this 'on-off signalling'. So this approach is based on the optical power or intensity of light. The stronger a light pulse, the higher its amplitude. See the top diagram.  The Achilles of this approach is chromatic dispersion, namely that fact different frequencies of light traverse a solid medium such as fibre glass at different speeds. Now any laser pulse is a band of frequencies. It may be narrow, but it always has non-zero width. So chromatic dispersion is inevitable (like Donald Trump continuously changing tariff rates). As the fibre path distance grows, the probable outcome is that a laser might transmit a '1 0' but the light will spread over time and the opt...
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Softbank Builds Two New Japanese Cable Landing Stations For The ETA Cable

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Japan suffers from a lack of physical diversity in cable landings. For example, the Maruyama CLS serves 8 cables, most of them major Internet arteries including ASE, APG, Jupiter, TPE, and ADC. According to the Submarine Networks website the country has more than 20 facilities. However, they are densely concentrated as the map below shows. Moreover, it would not be surprising if many of the are sharing back haul fibre. Consequently, the Japanese government is giving money to Softbank for the construction of two new cable landing stations in the Hokkaido and Fukuoka projects because they make nations's telecommunications more robust The project's anchor tenant is the ETA (East to America) subsea cable.  In general I am skeptical of subsidies for a variety of very good reasons, namely they usually distort the allocation of resources in pursuit  of political gain. However, aid for new cable landings that are diverse to the existing landing infrastructure may be exception. It woul...
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Package Deal: 3x 100G Equiano Waves: $54K Total ($17K Per)

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 A point: Lisbon Equinix (LS1). Z point: MDXI, Server House or Medaillion facilities. Term: 1 Year. Cross connects not included.
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Pacific Cable Outage Report: RNAL Segments Down

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***Hong Kong/Tokyo, Tokyo/Taipei, and Hong Kong/Taipei. ***Outages started 10:14 GMT, July 6th, 2025. ***Until a cable ship can investigate, no idea of the cause. ***I caution the paranoids among you to refrain from speculation. Hong Kong is part of China so the sabotage theory is most likely bogus. *** The graph shows that the common factor among these segments is Taipei.
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Goggle's New TransAtlantic SOL Cable: The March South

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Google's SOL cable is the first Trans-Atlantic network to connect Florida to Europe with a landing at the Telxius Santander CLS on the Northern Spanish coast. The other cable, Nuvem, announced some time ago, will link the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina CLS owned and operated by DC BLOX to a landing near Lisbon. Details are sparse regarding SOL, but it will probably be similar in performance and design to the 16 fibre pair Nuvem cable that clocks 384 Tbps. The Florida landing is in the Palm Coast area between Jacksonville and Orlando. An interesting feature is that both cables do island hopping. Both cables land in Bermuda and Azores (where a US Air Force base is located). Island hopping serves three goals. The first is power to offset voltage drop. Intermediate power feeding en route improves throughput. The more often a cable can feed, the higher the bandwidth. The other factor is optical amplifier noise. Amplification introduces noise which accumulates from amplifier to amplifier. ...
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