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ICPC Study On Subsea Cable Outages: Less In The West & More In East Asia

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The International Cable Protection Committee has conducted a statistical study using an 18 year time series that includes 3,000 repairs. A link to the article is attached to this post. A fault is any damage to a cable that affects performance or might in the future (like a shunt fault). 1. Fault rates per kilometer of cable have dived over the last two decades. Total annual repairs range between 150 and 200, yet total subsea cable mileage has risen from 900,000 kilometers in 2008 to 1.4 million today. However, this underestimates the decline as fibre pair mileage is probably 5x greater today than in 2008 as fiber pairs per cable have risen from 4 pairs in 2008 to 16 pairs today. 2. Faults in European waters and the Atlantic have dramatically declined due to better burial of subsea cables, distributing cable maps to commercial ships, more careful cable routing, and less fishing in some waters. For example, Northwest Europe, which includes Ireland, UK, France, Iceland, Belgium, Netherla...
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Coreweave Stock Price Down 25% Past Week: CEO Laments 'Irrational Market'

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According to Coreweave's CEO, "The market is being irrational". Except it is not. The company's quarterly interest payments are 4x its quarterly operating income. The company has simply too much debt and cannot grow revenues fast enough to internally finance interest payments. Right now Coreweave's liabilities-to-revenue ratio is 4.1. This includes bank loans, bonds, and long term leases. Moreover, revenues are a tiny fraction of capital spending.  Consequently, most investment spending is debt financed, but the debt markets are now closed to Coreweave because it would be forced to pay what its current long debt is yielding, namely 15% to 16%, usurious rates. In addition, its order backlog is growing due to a faltering supply chain, and global interest rates are steadily rising.  The most common CEO lament during the 2001 dotcom crash was, ironically, the market is being irrational. 😉 The current price to insure Coreweave's bonds against default implies a 60%...
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The Pisces Project Moves Forward: Microsoft Buys Fibre Pair IRU

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This project will deploy the first fibre optic cable to connect connect Ireland to Continental Europe. Pisces provides a unique route that sharply improves the resiliency of Ireland's connectivity to the rest of the world. The EU loves projects that bypass non-EU countries and directly ties together EU member states. As the UK is notorious for surveillance, it is particularly welcomed. Consortium members include the Irish subsea permitting firm, MDM, an equity fund appropriately named Equitix, and Orange. The cable will have 16 fiber pairs. I estimate aggregate throughput will be at least 320 Tbps. I admire the unique routing of this system. What is not clear to me is the hyperscaler demand for its capacity. Microsoft has agreed at least in principle to take a fibre pair. There is certainly a prima facie case for Google and Amazon to take single fibre pair IRUs on the system because it will improve their own network's resiliency. However, that advantage must be balanced against...
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Equiano Historical Outage Performance Versus WACS & ACE

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WACS has a lower latency than Equiano between Lagos and Lisbon, but you are going to pay a high price in outage time if history proves a good guide. The ACE record is significantly better than WACS, but both systems are light years behind Equiano. For reliability Equiano wins hands down. In fact, if you can only afford one cable and Equiano has your desired route, Equiano is the way to go. See the three cable's outage performance below. Equiano: RFS February, 2023. Wet system cumulative outage hours: 0. Dry System: Under 48 hours. WACS RFS: May 2012. Wet system cumulative outage hours: 4,903. Dry system outages: 140. Downtime/System Operational Life Span: 4%. ACE RFS: December 2012. Wet system cumulative outage hours: 2,472. Dry system outages: 70. Downtime/System Operational Life Span: 2%. What adds salt to the wound is that force majeure protected the capacity owners from any obl...
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The Pacific Rim Triangle Capacity Crunch

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Layer 1 bandwidth is increasingly tight in the Pacific Triangle consisting of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In particular, many carriers' spare ADC capacity is completely gone. Whole fibre pairs are exhausted. Most older cables like SJC are maxed out. Even SJC2 is mostly gone. A large number of resellers is compounding the bandwidth misery by demanding 100G pricing in the $9K to $12K range. This is absurd and not happening. I know of 3x ADC 100G waves available on the Tokyo/Singapore route. One year contracts only. Non-Chinese carrier and equipment. Demarcation points are SG1 and Maruyama CLS. MRC is an inexpensive $13.7K. Don't be a fool and shop this price because this is the network operator's offer, not a resale by me. I don't resale. I take you to the Source (like the Machine Main Frame in the Matrix film series). There is one SJC2 100G wave available for contract early February. SG3/CC1. Available on a 3 year contract at $13.5K MRC plus a $10K install. One SJC...
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Developments In My Procurement and Consulting Practice: Subsea Cable Databases, Part Time Employees, and A New Website

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I am starting to create subsea cable databases available to clients that include a variety of details ranging from RTDs, fibre pairs on each branch, outage histories, etc. Will probably incorporate a new company in Latvia for all the telecommunications procurement and consulting activities. Be bringing on part time employees. Also creating a new website to create some independence from social media: https://subseacables.blog/blog/. 
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AI Cloud Provider Coreweave's 15% Bond Yields Signal Bankruptcy

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Insurance on AI data center provider Coreweave's debt is pricing a 50% chance of bond default during the next 24 months. Current yield on the company's long debt is 15%. AI is a real estate bubble and Coreweave is likely to be the first to crash and burn. Most top notch computer scientists like Turing Prize winner Jann LeCun view the current generation of AI, large language models, as a hyped technology that is fundamentally flawed. LLMs are statistical models whereas human intelligence can generate universal statements, not just probabilities. Statistical models like LLMs simply extrapolate trends and are not capable of true imagination. In the language of mathematics, anything truly original is orthogonal to the estimated statistical model. This is the true origin of AI slop. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-14/coreweave-s-brazen-dream-crashes-into-reality-as-yields-top-15?srnd=homepage-asia. 
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