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Sparkle & Turkcell Building New Subsea Cable Into Turkey

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Turkey has bee a very tough market for global ISPs. Until EXA lit terrestrial fibre a few years ago across the Bulgaria's border with Turkey, 100G pricing was $15K per month and above. EXA now dominates the key Frankfurt to Istanbul route with lower pricing. But the situation is not ideal. Physical diversity is an illusion across the narrow border with one conduit system carrying much of the international traffic. Sparkle's old Mednautilus system does provide an alternative to the land routes, but it's primacy has been too high for foreign ISPs in Turkey to flourish. Sparkle has signed a memorandum of understanding with Turkcell to build a subsea cable that will land in the Instanbul suburd of Izmir and at Chania, Greece. The yet unnamed cable will interconnect at Chania, a Greek island, to the BlueMed cable which will carry the traffic to Marseille, Milano, and other key telecom hubs. We have few details on the cable itself other than a target design throughp...

Express SMW5 100G Special

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A point: MRS1; Z point: SG1; Express Route; $31.5K MRC; 1 Year. Target RFS Date : Mid of June, 2025

Pacific Wavelength Capacity Promotions

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 1. APG Cable; 100G; Hong Kong/Singapore; $8500 MRC; 1 Year. 2. ADC; 100G; Tokyo/Singapore; $13,850 MRC; 1 Year. 3. ASE; 100G; Tokyo/Singapore; $18,000 MRC; 1 Year. 4. ASE; 100G; HK/Tokyo; $8,500 MRC; 1 Year. 5. ASE; 100G; HK/Singapore; $5500 MRC; 1 Year Remarks: Customers responsible for cross connects. Pricing is the same whether from CLS to CLS or carrier neutral POP to carrier neutral POP.

AI, Computer Scientists, Data Center Builds, and Facebook's Subsea Cable Waterworth

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The emerging computer scientist consensus is that large language models are a dead end and will never achieve general artificial intelligence. It is interesting in this respect that Microsoft just cancelled two gigawatts worth of data center projects. Analysts at TD Cowen, an investment management firm, argue that a data center glut is developing due to too many AI-driven projects. Their view is supported by senior management in the cloud and data center industries. "Earlier this week, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Joe Tsai warned of a potential bubble in data center construction, saying new projects may exceed demand for AI services." Right now the main demand is for AI writing and data summary services via chatbots. It takes a special kind of obtuseness to think these services merit hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in data centers, GPUs, and servers.  The herd phenomenon where copy cats pile into a sector due to investor excitement, but without a soli...

Inconvenient Truths About Tariffs and America's Trade Deficits

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The chart shows that foreign tariffs on US goods and services are not much higher than US tariffs on their foreign counterparts. European tariffs on US goods and services are less than 2% higher than their American counterparts. There were no tariffs between the US, Canada, and Mexico prior to Trump's trade war. My forecast is the planned Republican tax cuts guarantee that the US continues to run high trade deficits. In fact, they will grow as higher government deficits raise US interest rates and strengthen the dollar. A higher dollar reduces the price of imported goods and services and raises the price of American exports.  In light of the small tariff differentials no trade agreement is likely to compress the US trade deficit. Now there are always non-tariff barriers that a free trade agreement could dismantle, but some will undoutedly remain because many counties have higher quality and safety  standards than the US. For example, European meat has lower bacter...

SWM5 100G: Djibouti/Singapore Global Switch = $22.5 MRC

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1 Year Term; Customer handles cross connects.

The New E2A Cable: RFS 2028

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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. ...