Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

I came across several instances of dubious subsea cable business models at the conference. 1. For example, one subsea cable startup thinks it can skip equity investments and actually finance its project via debt in the form of bonds. This idea makes absolutely zero sense to anyone with a finance background or experience in the field. The problem with debt is that you must make payments even through your revenues will be zero for several years while the project is executed. Furthermore, it is total crap to claim you will sell capacity IRUs prior to RFS. The simple fact is that sales prior to substantially finishing the project never happen. In the six months prior to RFS sales can happen because carriers can see the project is almost ready. Indeed, that is when the hyperscalers sell capacity. But a debt-financed project needs big IRU deals from the day that bonds are issued. Financial history is quite clear on this point. Telecom infrastructure projects in their early stages are almost ...

This is the Peace cable's Marseille backhaul. It illustrates standard landing architecture as well as good network design. First of all, the cable comes ashore outside Marseille Port's own cable landing facilities for the sake of physical diversity and resilience. Always put some distance between a cable and others if possible. This increases the cable's value and demand for its capacity because diversity means adding it to the network portfolio improves its resilience. It is analogous to the role of diversification in a financail portfolio. Like all other subsea cables, Peace terminates in a beach manhole where it was spliced to a terrestrial fibre cable that also contains a power conductor just like the subsea cable. Then the terrestrial fiber goes to an Orange 'CLS', really just a power feed hut. From there the cable becomes part of a fully diverse fibre ring that includes dual entrances into MRS2 where most of the cable's SLTEs are kept. Most likely this fib...

Route Latency SG/Marseille 136 ms Mombasa/Marseille 104 ms Karachi/Marseille 92 ms Karachi/Signapore 82 ms Kenya/Singapore 93 ms.

Everyone at the conference wants to be Keppel. The carrier bought five fibre pairs on the 12 fibre pair Bifrost subsea network at construction cost and then sold them individually for a total of $1.2 billion dollars. This is a classic example of bandwidth arbitrage that has investors outside the industry salivating and has many Pacific wholesale carriers hoping to do the same thing in the future. Why do the heavy lifting of providing lit services when you can buy fibre pairs at construction cost and then flip them? What made Keppel so successful is that Bifrost was the first cable to directly link Asia's premier telecom hub, Singapore, to the US. And the fact that the hyperscalers kept the rest of the capacity for themselves. So Keppel ended up as the monopoly supplier of capacity to the entire wholesale market. So the moral is be the sole carrier partner on a sexy hyperscaler project and watch customers coming running to you with the enthusiasm of teenage girls at a Beatles concer...

Most African cables traverse the Congo Canyon as opposed to detouring around it. The canyon is not particular deep, but it is huge in terms of floor coverage. Depth varies from 1400 to 1600 meters. Le Trou Sans Fond canyon off Abidjan drops 2300 meters where the canyon meets the continental shelf. It is perfect recipe for sediment and debris avalanches.  These canyons were created by strong river currents that carve the ocean bottom and also deposit sediment. Debris and sediment slides can easily crush the older African cables lying at the bottom. In contrast, both Equiano and 2Africa are routed around these danger spots. That increases latency, but reduces outages. Sometimes African ISPs are short sighted in this matter. They take WACS despite the exorbitant costs and high likelihood of extended down time because it is a bit faster.  An interesting question is how long will WACS be worth operating given the accumulated optical loss from one or two outages each year. The more ...

My understanding is that standard practice is to slice a damaged cable in two prior to retrieval. Hard to lift a 14,530 kilometer cable otherwise. 😃