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Amazon's First Solo Undersea Project: The Atlantic Fastnet Cable

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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...
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Turbidity Currents & Subsea Cable Outages: Current WACS Outage

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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 ...
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WACS Down Hard: Turbidity Current Due To Heavy Rain Suspected

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Heavy rains in Côte d'Ivoire likely caused rivers to dump large amounts of sediment at high speed into the Atlantic. These undersea mud Tsunamis accelerate down the deep gradient of the continental shelf off Abidjan and destroy anything in their path. In particular, they displace the sea floor up to several meters. It is likely that a turbidity current effectively disinterred the WACS trunk and severed it. The main value of WACS is moving traffic between Africa and Europe. So this outage imposes severe hardship on African ISPs. Outages off Côte d'Ivoire's shore are common and have disrupted Internet service in the country many times. For example, in 2024 a debris slide in the subterranean canyon off Abidjan took out four cables, including WACS. Côte d'Ivoire really needs high capacity fibre optic links into neighboring countries to better weather these network crises.
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2Africa Outage Due To Turbidity Current & Limited to Cote d'Ivoire

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ISPs in Ghana are reporting their 2Africa waves are up and running. So 2Africa's main trunk appears untouched. Hence the Cote d'Ivoire outage must be due to a branching segment fault. It is thought a turbidity wave caused the damage. This is a powerful surge of water, debris, and mud that can wash away the sediment covering buried cables and snap them like toothpicks. I call it an underwater Tsunami. It is triggered by an undersea avalanche due to an earthquake or a flooding river like the Congo pouring into the Atlantic. For example, the 2006 Taiwanese earthquake caused a turbidity current that tore apart 22 cables off the country's Southeast coast. This current traveled several hundred kilometers and reached speeds as high as 72 kilometers an hour. It is not clear what caused the turbidity surge off Abidjan. What we do know is that there is a large subterranean cavern, Le Trou Sans Fond, at Abidjan's doorstep. It was likely involved.  The last few days Cote d'Ivoi...
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2Africa Outage Off Abidjan

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This was initially diagnosed as a shunt fault, but the cable appears to be effectively severed with the approximate location of 9 kilometers from repeater 4 towards repeater 3. To the best of my knowledge this is 2Africa's first wet segment outage on the West African coast. No repair date is available at this time.
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Live Subsea Cable Update: WACS & 2Africa Outages

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Abidjan clients on WACS report an outage began 4 AM local time today. Outage began with a severe drop of 385 volts. Investigation shows the fault lies in segment S3C between the first and second repeater on the Ivory Coast branching unit. So the outage should only affect Cote d'Ivoire. A ship has been dispatched to fix it. Two years ago four cables were severed off Abidjan due to a debris slide in the subterranean cavern known as Le Trou Sans Fond. Also a 2Africa outage started 1:30 PM Abidjan time. More information will be provided as it becomes available. First map below is 2Africa. Second is WACS. 
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Another Google Trans-Atlantic Cable Has Landed: Nuvem

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Reliable sources indicate that Google's 16 fiber pair Nuvem (Portuguese for 'cloud') cable has landed. There is typically a lag of a year between landings and RFS. So expect the system to be fully activated next Spring. I assume, without any insider knowledge, that either EXA or Telxius will acquire spectrum or a fiber pair on Nuvem. The cable's design capacity is 384 Tbps. Nuvem lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, also home to Anjana and Firmina. For Google, which owns the South Atlantic Firmina cable, this solves a big problem. It can move traffic between South America and Europe via the Myrtle Beach CLS. It also diversifies the routing of Google's Atlantic traffic and reduces latency for both the Southern US and Southern Europe. Interestingly enough, Google used a subsidiary as the landing partner at Myrtle Beach, and at Sines, Portugal. The hyperscalers are becoming increasingly vertically integrated. In the past it was customary to outsource landings and cab...
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