Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

TAT-14 was the last traditional carrier consortium cable across the Atlantic. It was decommissioned in 2020. It was a two cable ring design and suffered notorious double outages. Below is a peak at a network monitoring computer terminal. Notice the vintage Sun computer. 

1. Lisbon/Capetown; $5,500; 1 year term; $5,500 NRC. 2. Lagos OADC/Lisbon; $5,000; 1 year term; $5,500 NRC. 3. Lagos OADC/Capetown CT1; $4,750 MRC; year term; $5,500 NRC. Remark: Equiano soars above the rest of African cables in terms of reliability. Plus the only cross connect charges are at carrier neutral data center POPs. 

This new 6 fiber pair cable directly connects Taiwan and the United States. It is a relatively low capacity system clocking 12.8 Tbps per fibre pair or 76.8 Tbps in total. It is the norm in our era for new ocean spanning cables to have at least 12 pairs and as many as 24. In that sense Orca is a throw back to the age of low fibre pair count coherent optical networks as opposed to the current high count spatial division multiplexing approach pioneered by Google's Dunant cable. Most likely META's traffic forecast is insufficient to justify a bigger count as Taiwan is a niche market of only 23 million people. While its economic significance is hard to exaggerate as the world's leading supplier of semiconductor chips, population still determines the size of traffic flows with a few exceptions like Singapore. It would not be surprising given the cable's transmission capacity if META keeps its all for its own use.  META subsidiaries land and hold the cable landing licenses o...

Pundits have wrecklessly proclaimed that Google believes in orbital data centers. A more accurate description is that the hyperscaler is exploring the idea's potential and obstacles by conducting orbital experiments like the SunCatcher satellite. But Google has no delusions that orbital data centers are a real alternative to terrestrial facilities for the next 10 to 20 years. Google runs lots of experiments because it has lots of cash.  At a recent conference Google's head of data center energy expressed skepticism that orbital data centers make sense any time soon. The costs could be as much as 100x their terrestrial counterpartsin the case where maintaining and upgrading hardware is included. To be clear, 100x was not the best estimate, but reflects the fact that greenfield developments involving new and untested technologies generally result in massive overruns. Moreover, costs depend on whether it is a throw away orbital data center where no components are replaced or repai...

Starlink is introducing congestion pricing in rural America in places like Kansas and Missouri despite a 10,000 satellite constellation. There is only one credible explanation: capacity shortages. Moreover, adding satellites will not fix the problem. Physics and mathematics set non-negotiable limits on per subscriber bandwidth. Enormous Satellite Constellations Yield Only A Trickle of Throughput Per Square Kilometer Starlink's V3 satellite can transmit a terabit per second to Earth. Assume generously that Musk has 42,000 of them four or five years in the future. That's 42 petabits of download capacity. The average person or even the business community will be fooled into thinking this is enormous capacity. Assume it is evenly distributed over the earth's surface of 520 million square kilometers for sake of simplicity. That equals only 82 megabits per square kilometer. Not a flood, just a trickle.  Now you can place more satellites in certain orbits to target more densely po...

Cable: 2Africa. A point: JB1, South Africa. Z point: IColo 1, IColo 2, Telehouse or Seacom CLS. Initial Bandwidth: 10G. Granular Layer 1 FlexE service can be upgraded in 1G increments up to 100G. FlexE Protocol 1. Granular Layer 1 with Ethernet wrapping. 2. No jitter. 3. Layer 1 latency. 4. No Ethernet switching. 5. FlexE: https://www.oiforum.com/technical-work/hot-topics/flex-ethernet-flexe-2/.