Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Musk confuses cooling a hot object in space with a cold object in space. A vacuum eliminates cooling via convection or conduction. Consequently, cooling in space is much slower than on Earth. Only thermal radiation is available and simulations demonstrate that objects cool much slower in space than on earth. An object without internal heating will settle down to 3 Centigrade degrees above absolute zero. But an orbital data has plenty of internal heat and it can easily overheat if the radiators are not sufficiently large.  What is scary is that Musk has the title of SpaceX CTO and he is clearly unqualified given his physics illiteracy. Click to enjoy the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1umCJfbJ0w. 

WACS cumulative outage time totals 4% of operating life and ACE 2%. In contrast, Equiano has had zero wet segment faults and under 48 hours of total down time. Equiano's minor outages have been due to power failures at Lisbon Equinix (LS1) and OADC Lagos (power feed equipment failure) plus backhaul fibre cuts between CLS and CT1 (Capetown Teraco 1). WACS and ACE defenders will argue that any reliability comparison is unfair due to the older cable's longer outage history. But their outages are concentrated in subsea caverns that Equiano avoids. So Equiano's reliability edge is probably real.

1. Facility currently consumes only 720kw. Current power capacity is three megawatts. To me this suggests the facility is only 25% full. This is consistent with the opinions of other members of my tour group (Nigerian Peering & Interconnection Forum). 2. Facility design is standard. The Equiano subsea cable uses the sea facing fibre entrance. There are fibre entrances on the building's other three side. So good fibre entrance diversity. 3. Four diesel generators for power back up. Only one is needed to cover current consumption. So good backup power redundancy. 4. The Google CLS is a room in the data center. It was the anchor tenant that justified the project. 5. I suspect that Starlink will be installing its satellite dishes next to the building on the seaside. It has been a nightmare for Starlink to get its Equinix landlord earth stations up and running due to the cost of long haul fibre. OADC has affordable fibre optic connectivity and the sea and absence of tall buildings m...

 

A Chinese team achieved this new world record of 3.2 petabits per second on a single fibre strand using the C, L, and S bands combined with 24 optical cores. So they tripled the usable spectrum on each of the 24 optical highways to get aggregate throughput of 3.2 Tbps. Each core achieved 133 Tbps. It is increasingly common for terrestrial networks to use both C and L bands. For example, Arelion has used the C and L bands because their network routes only consists of one or two fiber pairs. I call it a low fibre count, DWDM-on-steroids approach. The C band is defined as 1530 to 1565 nanometer wavelengths whereas the L band ranges from 1565 to 1625. L band attenuation in standard fiber is only slightly higher than the work horse C band. So L is the natural place to start when expanding the spectrum range to gain more bandwidth. In contrast, the S band has significantly higher attenuation than either C and L band, and consequently, has not been implemented in commercial hardware. S band ...

 Nebius is one of the healthier publicly traded AI data centers companies. Nonetheless, its 2Q2026 income statement illustrates the industry's depreciation challenge. Despite Nebius linearly depreciating GPUs and other server hardware over a generous five years, total depreciation equals 48% of revenues. This figure underestimates true depreciation because technological change and physical burn out means the true average life span is closer to three years. Facebook has provided detailed data on equipment failure during its 56 day estimation of the Llama 3.0 frontier model: https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/the-llama-3-herd-of-models/ . For a 100,000 GPU cluster, equipment failure happens every 30 to 40 minutes. This halts estimation and requires starting over from the previous iteration. Almost all publicly AI data centers exaggerate their profitability and net cash flows by pretending the server hardware lasts 60% longer than it is really does. Michael Burry, who success...