Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

1. The West coast network from Lisbon and London to South Africa should be all activated by year's end. 2. Note that 2Africa is an open cable system which means each fibre pair and spectrum owner is responsible for their SLTEs. So it quite possible that consortium member X is ready today whereas member Y might be RFS only in December. 3. RFS Guidelines A. London, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa will be RFS at the beginning of September. B. Côte d'Ivoire should be live a month later. C. Senegal is at least 2 to 3 months from launch and could be as late Christmas. 4. Buying Guidelines A. I expect the combined impact of 2Africa and Equiano to drive Lisbon/Lagos 100G market pricing below $20K. On this route I recommend 1 year contracts. B. In Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and DRC you should do long term contracts because there is no guarantee that 2Africa will permanently lower pricing. Short term the cable will do so. But it is least 2 to 5 years before another modern cable lan...

The new sport in Japan is breaking long haul fibre optic transmission records. NEC and the Japanese government agency, the National Institute of Communication Technology (NICT), announce new throughput records every 6 to 8 months. It is a major area of research. At the SubOptic 2025 conference NEC representatives did many presentations on their multicore research. NICT has taken a slightly different approach of combining multiple spectrum bands (C+L) with multicore fibre. This is more challenging because there are few C+L amplifier products on the market. In fact, only Subcom has manufactured and deployed such a system on the PLCN cable. Japan by the way has been a hub of innovation in optical networking and other high tech areas like space exploration. However, long term economic prospects are poor due to population decline and the low status of women which means their talents are underutilized.  What is special about this record breaking effort is the use of a 19 core fibre stran...

The great fibre optic revolution in subsea cables has two components: the fibre optic strands and the optical amplifiers. The first fibre optic subsea cable was the three fibre pair TAT-8, which connected the US to both the UK and France using a simple branching unit. But the amplifiers used computers. Hence there was no way of upgrading them to accommodate faster transmission rates. Fortunately, quantum mechanics came to the rescue. The most successful scientific theory of all times posits that adding energy to an atom will cause it to emit photons. This was one of Einstein's contributions. An American graduate student in the 80s discovered that the rare earth element erbium had special properties. If it was incorporated into glass, then a pump laser directed at the glass would raise the energy level of the erbium ions and cause them to release photons. This in itself is not that exciting. We know that any object will issue photons depending on its temperature. But if signal photo...

African carriers need to adopt the more pragmatic approach of European, North American, and Asian carriers. Virtually no carriers in these regions require customers to sign NDAs to get a price quote. It accomplishes nothing since buyers share pricing information with impunity. Nor is there need to sign the MSA and then the service order form. Again, American carriers, including competitive publicly traded carriers like Lumen, skip the NDA unless the client requests it, and even skip the MSA by putting language in the SOF that says signing it implies acceptance of the default MSA. Clearly this bureaucratic quagmire is the fault of the colonial powers that once governed Africa. They imposed their clumsy 19th century European administrative systems on the continent during the colonial period. When independent African states emerged in the 1960s, they inherited these administrative regimes. Lawyers don't understand that business is more than ris...

Each fibre strand consists of the core and the cladding. The core is like a one way road for the light to traveland cladding are the guardrails that prevent it from escaping. The refractive index measures how fast light traverses a given medium. It is defined as the ratio of the speed of light in a vacuum to the velocity of light via the medium. The core has a higher refractive index than the cladding. As long as the refractive index differential is large enough, photons that hit the cladding at a critical angle or less will bounce back into the core. Physicists call this bouncing of light internal reflection. So the core/cladding structure is designed to preserve the optical power or amplitude of the wavelengths. It minimizes optical attenuation, the great enemy of optical networking along with chromatic and polar dispersion.  The bottom middle chart shows that optical attenuation, which reflects opposing forces, reaches a minimum in the C band. The C band is defined as wavelength...

 2Africa; Senegal/Portugal; 100G; $18.5K; 2 Years. WACS; Ivory Coast/Portugal; 10G; $8,250; 3 Years. 2Africa; Nigeria/South Africa; 100G; $24,750; 1 Year. Equiano; Nigeria/South Africa; 100G; $20K; 1 Year. Equiano; Nigeria/Portugal; 100G; $19.5K; 2 Year. 2Africa; Ghana/Nigeria; 100G; $23.5K; 1 Year. 2Africa; Ivory Coast/Portugal; 10G; $10,500; 1 Year. 2Africa; Ivory Coast/Portugal; 100G; $33.5K; 3 Year. Remarks: 2Africa CLS cross connects are $150 max. WACS cross connect charges are five digit.