Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Few details are available at this point. It has been clear to me for some time that the 2Africa and Equiano networks are insufficient to meet growing African Internet traffic. This reflects two factors. First, the limited number of Equiano landings: Togo, Nigeria, Namibia, and South Africa. Secondly, the 2Africa has only 180 Tbps of capacity, but serves 17 African states. Moreover, it also serves many Middle East countries, Pakistan, and India. The Nigerian government is concerned that the country lacks subsea resiliency. Published reports hint at its desire for a new route, but it is not obvious what it would be. One possibility is a direct US-Nigeria link perhaps connecting Atlanta or Ashburn Equinix to Lagos. Or perhaps a Nigeria to France or Spain direct link. Bloomberg article on subject: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-23/nigeria-in-advanced-talks-with-google-for-new-undersea-cable. 

 At an Irish Peering event in late 2025, Geoff Bennett, Director of Solutions and Technology at Nokia, gave a presentation on the development of spatial division multiplexing. We will do a slide-by-slide exposition of his presentation. ***Geoff's estimate is that there are 570 operational fibre optic cables world wide. This makes sense given the large number of islands with subsea cables. In fact, given the efforts of the EU to extend cable to the many islands of its member states, these figures should steadily rise. Google is also ramping cable connectivity to Pacific and Indian island clusters, including Christmas Island, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Maldives, etc. ***Geoff notes that 81 cables are in planning or deployment stage. ***It is almost obligatory these days to note that these cables make possible over $10 trillion in daily global transactions, driven by financial flows and international trade.

Lagos metro data center connectivity is notorious for outages due to year-around construction with a 'I don't give a damn' attitude. Our new metro network rides new, truly diverse fibre pairs with no service affecting outages since deployment in early October. One path is aerial and the other buried. Aerial fibre can be more quickly repaired than buried fibre. All waves are route protected by default. Pricing is excellent. Services: Layer 1 10G, 100G, 400G, & 800G Waves. Terms: 1-20 Years. Payment Options: Leases & IRUs. Route Protection: Default For All Services. Cross Connects: Customer's Responsibility.

1. Ellalink connects Europe to Brazil. It offers a unique fibre optic path between Brazil and Europe. It is also much shorter than combining an Atlantic cable with a South American cable or an African cable with SACS or SAIL. Ellalink sharply lowers latency for traffic whose end points are South America and Europe. It adds resiliency as well to the regional telecom ecosystem. Wave costs are over $10K for a 10G and from the upper 20s to low 30s for a 100G.  Nonetheless, it struggled to get private funding because there is simply not a lot of traffic between Portuguese speaking Brazil and Europe. Most South American ISPs can more cheaply and conveniently do their peering and pick up content in Miami. A 100G wave from the Sao Paolo Equinix complex to the Miami NAP is now under $10K. That is a third less than going to Europe via Ellalink to pick up the same content or peer with the same counterparts. In fact, Ellalink should be cheaper than moving traffic from South America to Europe v...

This project excites many powerful groups in Europe. Scientists want to equip the cable with sensors to study the Arctic Ocean while the EU wants to strengthen its influence on the Far North and also create a unique, low latency communication link with Asia that bypasses North America. It is in large part about infrastructure sovereignty. The benefits are quite clear. Indeed, they are at first glance compelling. Right now the EU has given a few million Euros to a consortium of carriers and educational networks to design it and perhaps conduct the geophysical survey. Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated. Indeed, the project has two Achilles Heels. A single cable is likely to be down a good deal of the time. That is the track record of Arctic cables: outages take in many cases 4 to 9 months to fix. So it is necessary to build a ring, which means two diverse subsea cables. So the total project cost doubles. But that is just the beginning of the challenge. Most cable ships cannot...

The Michael Burry view is that companies are depreciating their GPUs over 5 year periods despite technological obsolescence in 18 months or less. This means negative profits and rates of return despite corporate claims to the contrary.  But heat stress also depreciates GPUs. AI Chips run marathon sessions during model estimation (training) often exceeding a month and GPUs often fail due to heat stress: "Imagine you had a 10,000 or even a 20,000 GPU data center. You should expect on the statistics a chip to fail about every 3 or 4 hours. So long before I get to the point where I’m rapidly turning these over because there’s a new generation of chips, I’m turning over a vast chunk of my chips just because they’re failing under thermal stress." Source: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-paul-kedrosky. GPUs used to estimate large language models are like ultra-marathon (50, 100, and 166 kilometers) runners on a 38 degree day.  It took Facebook 54 days to estimate the ...