Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Iceland's New Audur Subsea Cable Farice is building a new 16 to 24 fibre pair cable named after an Icelandic matriarch, Audur The Deep Minded, who sailed from Scotland to Iceland in the 9th century during the first wave of migration to the island. The cable lands in Southeast Iceland and in Scotland near Glasgow. The Icelandic backhaul will be fibre, but the British side is most likely spectrum. Farice views Audur as a replacement for the 22 year old FARICE-1. The ship survey will take place in the summer of 2027 with RFS planned for 2030. Audur falls into the monster capacity cable category. Sixteen fibre pairs can easily achieve 320 Tbps with 24 fibre pairs almost reaching a half petabit per second. What is really striking about this is Iceland's population, which although rapidly increasing due to immigration, is just shy of 400K. Undoubtedly, this reflects Farice's bullish assessment of data center demand driven by cheap hydro power and modest cooling needs. Although Ic...

Quintillion was really formed to build a subsea cable from Japan to Europe via the North Pole. It acquired the assets, mostly human capital and preliminary research, of Arctic Fiber in 2016, and as a first step deployed a North Alaskan subsea cable serving coastal communities plus some terrestrial fibre. See the map below on the left.  No expense was spared protecting it from the harsh environment. Quintillion was buried 3.5 to 4.5 meters deep, probably a record, and for landings a bore pipe was deployed. Nonetheless, it was an ultra-high risk project. Icebergs gouge the sea floor as they float. It is called ice scouring. They carve trenches as deep as 15 meters into the sea floor. The fact is that there is no viable protection against them. Moreover, there were no icebreaker cable ships to fix the cable in case of outages. This meant that outages during autumn, winter or spring could not be fixed until late summer. As an example, Quintillion's most recent outage began in January 2...

Amazon plans to dominate the business market for LEO connectivity. Its Ultra phase array antenna in satellite field tests with corporate beta users has simultaneously clocked 1.2 gigabits down and 400 megabits up. Indeed, LEO management has publicly stated that its download performance will be 2x better than Starlink's and enjoy 6x to 8x better uplink performance. The uplink edge is essential to Amazon's strategy. While residential Internet traffic is lopsided with downloads predominating, business and network applications are often symmetric or nearly. Even Starlink's 400 megabit service requires several hours to upload large gigabyte files.   Amazon is targeting mobile operators and IoT aggregation hubs for its 1 gigabit service. Mobile towers are often long distances from the nearest fibre optic network in many countries. Amazon will carry the local traffic back to the mobile operator's POP or data center. Indeed, Amazon's service is ideal for remote data center...

Arianespace will carry 32 Amazon satellites into orbit on April 28th. Amazon has booked a total of 18 launches that will expand the current 250 LEO constellation to 826 birds. For context, Starlink began service in the Northern latitudes when it had 700 operating satellites. So year's end is when competition begins in earnest. However, the Starlink groupies keep trying to move the goal post. They now claim either the company with the most infrastructure wins or they claim that Amazon cannot credibly offer service unless they have several thousands LEOs up and running. But here's reality. There is no real correlation between the amount of infrastructure and business success in telecom. Nor is there is a first mover advantage in telecom. Equinix and Digital Realty were not first movers in the colo industry. But they dominate today. Free came into the French mobile market in 2007, ten years after full liberalization, yet today has over 20% market share and completely...

Lagos is one of the Big Three African subsea cable hubs. It is also notorious for metro outages. Many data center pair fibre paths have multiple outages each week. In contrast, Transmission Co is offering a new OADC/Equinix route in a unique right of way without any outages since going live in early October. Standard transport services include Layer 1 10G, 100G, 400G, and 800G waves available as leases and IRUs. All services are route protected by default and are at a discount to the 'usual suspects'. This metro is designed and managed by the well respected Mark Tinka of Seacom fame. So don't settle for under-performing, over-priced metro garbage. Order the Best from Transmission Co. Contact me and Mark for details and a no-nonsense on-the-spot offer.

META financial reports don't even have an AI revenue category, yet Zuckerberg is spending $125 billion on infrastructure of which 80% is devoted to AI. The 2025 free cash flow was amost $60 billion versus a forecasted figure of $8 billion for 2026. Zuckerberg owns 15% of META, but each share has ten voting rights attached to it. The result is a busines leader without accountability to anyone.  https://thetechcapital.com/coreweave-expands-meta-deal-by-21-billion-plots-4-25-billion-debt-raise/