Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

A consortium consisting of TATA Communications, Lightstorm, Microsoft, and Singtel just announced a new 16 fibre pair subsea network tailored to serve the AI data center markets in Hyderabad, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. It includes two Indian landings, one in Southern Chennai and another at Machilipatnum, the latter being the shortest path to Hyderabad. Both Hyderabad and Lumpur host large numbers of data centers equipped with GPUs for rent to estimate AI large language models. Conversely, Singapore is a distribution point for estimated AI models. What is sometimes called AI inference. Both space and power in the city state are too limited and expensive for AI model estimation. Besides the Singapore and Indian landings, there will likely be a cable branch landing in the Malaysian province of Selangor, chosen because it is the shortest way to reach Kuala Lumpur. Public information on the new system is sparse, but it is also likely that cable will include be extended to Hyderabad and Ch...

Bypass the Red Sea and Persian Gulf quagmires as well as China and Chinese equipment. No Russian paper. Save at least 40 to 60 milliseconds over subsea routes via the Indian ocean.

SpaceX is the most over-valued stock in the Solar System with a stock valuation 100x current sales The smart money that invested in SpaceX as a private company knows it is wildly over-valued and will sell their stock when the IPO lockup periods expire this autumn. The float, the amount of shares registered for public trading, will increase 20% to 30%. That is a huge increase in supply. Moreover, the bond market, the best measure of risk, is pricing SpaceX bonds as junk. Unlike equity, bond investors are level headed and don't give a damn about technology hype. Only financials matter in the end. For a recent forecast of the impending implosion: https://finance.biggo.com/news/0e4c9f77-64fb-4bba-8193-43f26b36b74f. 

Another 29 Amazon satellites lifted into orbit yesterday. Total Amazon transmission capacity is now 396 Tbps. This is enough to begin initial service beginning of third quarter. The Musk Tribe has consistently told me that Amazon needs thousands of LEOs to begin service. Given Amazon's inked contracts with Delta Airlines, Apple, Vodafone, AT&T, and Hitachi construction company, it appears the Tribe was wrong. 😄It should be noted that Amazon's satellites are much higher capacity than Starlink's first generation, and Starlink began operations with 700 lower capacity LEOs. https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/07/03/amazon-set-to-launch-leo-its-rival-to-spacexs-starlink-internet-later-this-year

Fastnet is a 16 fibre pair submarine network landing in Maryland and in Southern Ireland near Castlefreke. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the first cable in perhaps ten years to land in Ireland and the first landing ever in Maryland. The Irish landing makes perfect sense; Amazon has roughly 350,000 m2 of data center space in the country. It hosts an important cloud region (eu-west-1) there in large part due to a very low corporate tax rate. In addition, it just received clearance to build three data centers near Dublin totaling usable space of 42,585 m2. The choice of Maryland again shows that the hyperscalers value resiliency versus latency more than do the wholesale carriers and telecom incumbents. The latter focus on low latency routes for both Internet backbone and financial trading firms. The main US East Coast telecom hubs are Secaucus Equinix and Ashburn Equinix. If latency was Amazon's top priority, Maryland would not have been the landing point. The sa...

A turbidity current is the likely culprit for the WACS trunk outage. The same holds true for the 2Africa Ivory Coast branch failure. The Taiwan earthquake of December 2006 is instructive in this regard. The 22 knocked out cables failed in sequence over the course of several hours. So the sheer force of the earthquake was not responsible. Instead, the seismic event caused sediment to begin moving down the undersea slope of Taiwan's continental shelf. This was not a gentle slope, but rather the steep sides of the Kaoping subsea canyon, which is 4 kilometers deep. As the chart shows, cables went dark in sequence radiating from the epicenter outward as this undersea tidal wave traveled down the sides of the subsea canyon. The turbidity current traveled at speeds ranging from 3.7 meters per second to 5.7 meters (roughly 20 kilometers per hour). The sequence of events suggests there were at least 2 and probably turbidity currents involved.  It is probably not a coincidence ...