Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Google announced today three new cables: Alisios, Canoa, and Olaluz. President Trump will not be happy with the names. Not American enough. Alisios is a Spanish word denoting the trade winds that cross the Carribean and the Equator. This cable will connect the Dominican Republic to Chile via Panamanian landings. So it will include new long haul fiber routes across Panama. Canoa links the Dominican Republic to Bermuda, where both of Google's new Trans-Atlantic cables, SOL and Nuvem, will also land. So similar to the Pacific where Google is landing six cables on Guam to create its own traffic exchange point, Bermuda is becoming another major private switching center for Google traffic. Traffic between Europe and the Caribbean or the West Coast of South America can now bypass the United States, improving resiliency, yet reducing latency. Indeed, traffic between Europe and Australia can now be routed via Chile because Google's Humboldt cable will link Chile and Austra...

Two year term.

"It's not out of the question that, at some point, Starlink will operate most of the world's internet," Musk said." Despite this optimism, shares of SpaceX fell by more than 7% in after hours trading on Tuesday, wiping out gains made during the day.

 

The 2Africa cable has been up and down since Wednesday. Repair was declared completed and all services live Friday Morning Abidjan time. WACS should be fixed by Wednesday next week.

 Oracle's stock price is diving. Why? A lesson for the AI industry. An AI data center customer faces no switching costs as they are simply installing data and software in bare metal servers leased to them by the data center. The result is a buyer's market as opposed to the traditional sellers market in which Equinix and Digital Reality operate. Oracle, the software company, reinvented itself as a cloud provider and then pivoted to AI data centers when the cloud angle proved disappointing and AI became hot.  But in a traditional data center the customer installs their equipment and this makes leaving the facility very expensive and difficult as it means they lose an operating network node. In many cases the exit costs can be in the millions of Euros or dollars and require a network redesign to ensure traffic flows are not disrupted. So the traditional data center is more like the Hotel California in the Eagles song where you can check in, but never leave.  In contrast, mos...