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The Second Half Petabit Trans-Atlantic Cable: META's US/Denmark Aurora Cable Project

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Facebook's subsea cable subsidary, Edge Cable Holdings, has petitioned the FCC to land a new cable at the NJIX data center in Wall Township, New Jersey. The cable lands in Europe at an Arelion owned facility in Blaabjerg, Denmark. META uses both NJIX and the Arelion facility for the power feed equipment, but is installing the submarine line termination equipment, which includes the lasers and electronics at a Piscataway carrier neutral data center and its Danish counterpart, an unnamed Esbjerg site. There are two huge data centers in Esbjerg. Facebook currently owns two fiber pairs on the consortium AEC-2 subset network linking the US and Denmark. AEC-2 has exactly the same end points as Aurora. Hyperscaler traffic has grown so rapidly that consortium membership in many cases simply makes no economic sense. Most hyperscalers need all the capacity that a cable provides and hence sole ownership as emerged as the most economic business model. We know very little about A...
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Lagos Construction Insanity & Metro Connectivity Solutions

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Communications Authority of Nigeria reports more than 5,000 fiber cuts in the first six months of 2026. If you are operating a Lagos network and need reliable 100G waves to connect your POPs, I have the solution. My provider offers route protected 100Gs as the default service and most them have few outages each year due to a unique backbone almost completely immune to construction digging cuts. The MRC for a route protected 100G connecting OADC, MDXI or Server House is $5,750 per month.
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Why Are the Hyperscalers Building So Many Cables With Weird Routing?

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Google is a good example. The Umoja cable directly links South Africa to Australia. Humboldt links Chile to Australia. There is also a new planned cable directly linking the Indian East Coast to South Africa. No carrier consortium would ever entertain lighting such routes.  The answer is simple. As Google revenues become bigger and bigger, the opportunity cost per millisecond of any network disruption rises. More money is lost per unit of time and hence it makes sense to plough more resources into resiliency. As economists say, marginal benefit exceeds marginal cost. Google isn't building South Africa to India because there is a flood of traffic between the two countries. A key reason to do is greater routing options and hence a more stable network. The other part of the answer is Google's cloud aspirations. Its current global market share is 15% versus Microsoft at 20% and Amazon's 28%. In other words, it is playing catch up. Now Amazon has most of the Fortune...
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A Note On Subsea Optical Amplifiers

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An optical amplifier being lowered in the sea during a cable deployment. They are designed to work at depths as great as 10,000 meters where pressure equals a thousand and one earth atmospheres. Their design lifespan is 25 years and they rarely fail. Almost all subsea cable damage involves the fibre cable itself as opposed to the amplifiers. Besides immense pressure, the amplifiers must resist sea salt corrosion. To do so their hulls are generally comprised of titanium or high strength beryllium copper alloys. Titanium offers an exceptionally high strength to weight ratio as well as unmatched corrosion resistance at ocean depth pressure. Beryrillium copper dissipates heat extremely well. This is essential as the amplifiers contain many lasers and they generate significant heat.
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Anatomy Of A Deep Sea Fibre Optic Cable

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On the left is a deep sea fibre optic cable. It consists of fibre pairs, ranging from two to 24, placed in a hermetically sealed stainless steel chamber surrounded by closely packed steel wires, then a copper power conductor layer, and finally a polyethylene sheath. The diameter is usually just 17 millimeters or 1.7 centimeters. A standard home garden hose in the US is about 16 mm. Deep sea cables must be thin because the cable's length can be as much as 12,000 kilometers. It would be very difficult to transport and lay a thick cable over long distances. Deep sea cables have always been thin. The engineering challenge is to make it thin and highly reliable.  Note that in shallow waters, usually defined as either 2,000 or 1,000 meters deep and less, the cables may have external armor in the form of steel wires wrapped around the polyethylene sheath. This protects against fishing and anchors. The cable sample on the right is armored. An armored cable typically has one to three sets o...
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London/Singapore Redundancy: When the Red Sea Gives You Heart Burn

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Routing: Singapore/Tokyo/LA/Secaucus Equinix/Slough Equinix.
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Invest In Your Human Capital: Classic Textbook on Subsea Cable Technology

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 I recommend this book on subsea cable technology. I am ordering it today for myself. https://shop.elsevier.com/books/undersea-fiber-communication-systems/chesnoy/978-0-443-29886-8
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