Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

 Amazon is racking up big wins left and right for its not-yet-launched LEO service. The pitch is quite simple: you are already our cloud customer, you love us, and we offer much higher throughput than Starlink. Plus there is no Musk stench.  Recent Kuiper Wins 1. Amazon recently won a big deal with an American airline, Jet Blue.  2. NBN is Australia's government sponsored wholesale network designed to ensure universal Internet service. It is a new Kuiper customer.   3. Airbus will install Kuiper transmission gear in its planes. Amazon offers gigabit speeds on its satellite links:  about 4 times greater than Starlink. This is important for corporations, governments, and research faciltiies.  See https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-07/satellite-internet-competition-nbn-amazon-starlink/105620108. 

The yellow cable at the top is Gulf2Africa. Apparently up. Below it in red is Falcon. Below Falcon is the green colored MENA Cable. Below MENA is the gray colored RAMAN cable, not yet activated. The blue cable is SWM4 and right below SWM4 is EIG.  So it looks like someone dragged anchor close to shore and cut those cables. They are right next to other so the story makes sense. Can anyone confirm Gulf2Africa is ok?

Three industry insiders have confirmed the 'epicenter' of the outages is in Yemen coastal waters at a depth of only one 100 meters. This strongly suggests fishing or more likely an anchor is responsible. Multiple sources have told me that neither Egyptian or Saudi Internet services has been degraded, but the Persian Gulf has been hit hard as well as Pakistan. This is consistent with the epicenter being off Yemen. It is also consistent with the cables reported down below. Four Cables Definitely Down: 1. EIG. 2. SWM4. 3. IMEWE. 4. Falcon Lower left map is SMW4. Center is EIG. Far right is IMEWE. Total capacity of these four cables is approximately 44 Tbps. Pakistan is heavily dependent on SWM4, EIG, and IMEWE. Scattered reports initially suggest AAE1 may also be down. But it is not.

Microsoft has warned Azure customers of degradation in Internet performance due to "multiple outages in the Red Sea". Both IMEWE and SWM4 appear to be down near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A subsea cable customer has told me that EIG, AAE1, and Falcon are also down or at the bare minimum damaged. Internet latency has risen in the UAE and Pakistan. Please do not speculate about saborage. It is irresponsible as Ockham's Razor applies in this situation. Ockham was a Medieval European philosopher who argued that the simplest explanation that accounts for the fact is the most plausible. It has become a bedrock principle of science. Conspiracy theoriest which include a lot of so-called national security experts routinely violate the principle in their quest for $500 an hour consulting gigs. Multiple simultaneous outages suggest a common cause such as anchor dragging As you can see, Jeddah is effectively a single point of failure for subsea networks. Cables landing at Jeddah include A...

For decades optical power loss of the best performing solid core fibre has hovered around .14dB per kilometer. So it comes as a surprise and a shock that the Microsoft owned hollow core fibre optic company, Lumensity, has designed a hollow core that beats all solid core glass in minimizing optical loss. The new hollow core design was tested using a 15 kilometer spool and the result was .091 dB loss at the standard long haul 1550 nanometer wavelength. Even more impressive was the fact that the optical loss remains under .1 from 1481 nanometers wavelength to 1625 nm. This range represents about 18 Terahertz of raw spectrum. But even that is not the end of the story. Light intensity loss remains under .2 dB all the way from 1250 nm to 1750 nm. In other words, it encompasses the O, E, S, C, L, and U bands. In contrast, attenuation varies with frequency for solid core silica fibre with a global minimum at 1550 nm. Loss is simply too high in the O, E, S, and U bands. This limits usable spect...

Hollow core fibre has been around a long time. Early versions had really high optical loss of 1 db/km, but speeds close to what light travels in a vacuum (299,792, kilometers per second) versus approximately 200,000 kilometers per second in solid core fibre. The high optical loss limited deployment to very short links deployed for low latency trading. Firms like Jump trading have installed hollow core fibre from their microwave towers into financial exchange data centers like the CME facility in Aurora, Illinois. EUNetworks has deployed it in the London metro to connect financial exchange trading points. In hollow core the light tends to quickly scatter and bounce around so optical intensity fades very quickly. In solid core scattering is far less so the transmission rates are much greater at the price of a big latency penalty. The other drawback is manufacturing and cost. Solid core draws molten glass and allows gravity to shape into a strand. We can't do that with hollow core. As...