Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Advice For Buyers Very little SWM5 and AAE1 capacity on the key Marseille/Singapore route. Moreover, the Peace Cable is still 4 months away, and SWM6 at least 6 months out. Blue-Raman's Marseille/Mumbai segment is scheduled to go live November, 2025.  Plenty of Equiano capacity   so now is the time to grab it over the next 6 months. I know several vendors holding 500Gs to multiple terabits ready to cut a deal.  European wavelengths have never been cheaper. It is now possible to build a basic 100G European backbone that includes 10x 100G waves for 10K Euros or less per month. So now is the time for African ISPs to expand their networks into Europe to peer and buy better transit. I have intimate knowledge of pricing, latency, resiliency, and physical diversity options across the major long haul European providers. My expertise will save a lot of time as well as avoid costly mistakes.  The badass 240 terabit per second Firmina cable is coming to South America and it will crash prices

 ***Well informed sources tell me that Blue-Raman is unlikely to go live before November 2025. My suspicion is that this is due to the terrestrial fibre builds across the Saudi Arabian desert as well as Jordan and Israel.  ***The 2Africa cable consortium controls its cable landing stations. So CLS operators are essentially employees. Not Masters of the Universe like in most previous African projects. 😀 In fact, the consortium financed many of the new 2Africa landing stations. And furthermore, not only are cross connect and back haul charges capped, but there are performance standards imposed on operators in terms of delivering power, space, cross connects, and anything else that affects circuit delivery or performance. Below is the 2Africa cable landing in Nigeria. 

Milano/Palermo;  2,000€.  Milano/Thessaloniki; 7,500€.  Coresite 1 Wilshire/San Jose Equinix; $1,750.  Hawaii DC/Coresite 1 Wilshire; $17,500. LS1 Lisbon/MDXI Equinix Lagos; $25,000.  CT2 Capetown South Africa/JB2 Johannesburg; Route Protected ; $8,500.  Valencia, Spain/Madrid Interxion 2; 1,250€.  Ashburn Equinix/Telehouse 2 Paris; Dunant Cable ; $6,250.  HK/Singapore; AAG  cable ; $13,500.  TY4 Tokyo/Coresite 1 Wilshire; Unity Cable ; $18,500.  

Academic studies generally suggest that ships cause anywhere from a plurality to a majority of subsea cable outages. The percentage varies over time due to natural variability. The number one villain among fishing boats are the bottom trawlers. Their nets scoop up fish and shellfish on the sea floor generally in shallow waters where sea life is more abundant due to higher oxygen and nutrient levels (plankton need light). It is in the range from 100 to 200 meters below sea level that trawlers cause the most damage.  Frequently the otter boards that support the nets dig deep into the sediment cutting or damaging subsea cables. See the diagram below.  The general consensus is that over the last 40 years fishing's relative contribution to subsea outages has been falling. This reflects depleted open sea  fisheries (fish farming has largely replaced them) as well as deeper cable burial and more emphasis on prevention. Another reason is the rise in global shipping as exports grow relative

The Dubious Narrative That Modern Subsea Cables Rarely Have Outages Earlier this year SMW5, which is a modern high capacity system RFS in 2016, experienced an outage in the Malacca Strait. It took the Indonesian ship almost a month to repair the cable because it could not find it. 😀 It happened because currents swept away the sediment in which cable was buried and it had drifted over 20 kilometers from the original burial path. Some commentators in the Linked 01 submarine cable group have claimed that many systems rarely have outages or in some cases no outages over their entire operating life. I have no doubt that new cables have fewer outages due to deeper burial. Also cable construction companies today more consistently avoid geologically dangerous areas. In the past West African cables were knowingly deposited in unsafe areas like Congo Canyon because it was cheaper than going around them or building cable landing stations near better landings. Four cables land at the Abdijan CLS

Africa-1 connects the telecom gateway to Europe, the Marseille Interxion campus, to the Middle East and East Africa. Over the last 15 years Marseille has become a telecom hub rivaling Paris, London, and Frankfurt because so many cables land there and place their landing stations in Interxion cages. The cable landing stations in MRS1 and MRS2 led to many carriers colocating in those buildings in order to cross connect to them. So Marseille went from being a telecom nobody in 2010 to a telecom hub today rivaling Europe's most important. The fact that virtually everyone is in Marseille Interxion means there is no need to extend the subsea cable to other cities. Furthermore, France has the largest Arab and Moslem population in Europe. So probably there is a lot of residential and business traffic between France and the Middle East. Algeria is a former French colony.  Africa-1 links Marseille, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti,Yemen, UAE, Paksistan, Somalia, and the IT hub of Easte

Three subsea cables dominate Southeastern Europe. Telecom deregulation came late to this corner of the European continent. Greece was only deregulated in 2000. Turkey is only partly deregulated today in 2024. Although the Southeast was one of the richest areas on the planet during the Roman and Ottoman Empires, today it is very poor. Greece's per capita GDP is 23,800 Euros versus the EU mean of 35,500€. Even the waters are challenging as a good part of the Aegean sea is shallow and ships are everywhere. Mountains make terrestrial fibre builds very challenging.  Sparkle's six fibre pair MedNautilus cable has dominated the Southeast since it went live in 2001. It is designed as a ring so that route protection is an option. The cable went live as a 10G backbone in 2001. Today its capacity is 3.84 Tbps with a 100G backbone. MedNautilus connects Sicily to Israel via a ring topology and offers the same protection for Greece. MedNautilus also connects Turkey to Europe via a subsea lan

Equiano is a Google cable. A 12 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing system designed to do at least 12 Tbps per pair. This cable is a must-have for African ISPs as it connects the three key telecom hubs of Portugal (Lisbon Equinix (LS1)), Nigeria (the Open Access Data Center (OADC) in Lagos), and South Africa (Capetown Teraco (CT1) in South Africa), has massive capacity and is vastly more reliable than older African cables.  Equiano not only connects the key telecom hubs essential to West Africa's Internet, but is also buried two meters deep and avoids the dangerous undersea areas like the Congo canyon and Le Trou Sans Fin that have caused many subsea outages. Le Trou experienced a debris slide this Spring that caused 4 African cables (SAT3, Mainone, WACS, and ACE) to be severed in the Ivory Coast's territorial waters. Equiano saved West Africa's Internet from a complete subsequent meltdown as its capacity was used to reroute traffic to Lisbon or South Africa. Equiano&#

Technology: Spatial Division Multiplexing. Fibre Pairs: 16.  Business Model: Consortium & Open Cable.  Fibre Pair Throughput: NA. Consortium Leaders: Google, Sparkle, Omantel.  Wholesale Capacity Players: Sify, Sparkle.  A point: Marseille Interxion.  Z point: Sify CLS, Mumbai.  Raman is the cable that could break open India's tightly controlled international capacity market. The cable is named after Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman who received the Nobel prize in 1930 for discovering that some of the light traversing a transparent medium is scattered and changes both wavelength and amplititude. This happens to be why the sea is blue. This 16 pair SDM cable will link Mumbai to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, and Jordan. Raman is striking in two respects. First, it is really an integrated part of the Blue-Raman cable that will function as an single network connecting Marseille to Mumbai and will be priced as a single, seamless capacity provider. It will bypass Egypt

A Big European Network Wants Your Business.  Huge, dense footprint encompassing both data centers and commercial buildings.  Includes the most reliable subsea cable across the English Channel linking London and Amsterdam.  Fibre in the Chunnel as well.  Both 100G and 400G wavelengths available.  For those ready to 'ascend' to the next  level, spectrum is also available.  Metro dark fibre in key markets like London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris.  Fast Provisioning. Ranges from two to four weeks.   Latency optimized routes for both general Layer 1 consumers like ISPs and financial traders.  Full diversity possible between all city pairs. 

Most subsea cables connect countries, but increasingly we are seeing cables that serve only a single country for a variety of reasons.Either the country is not contiguous like Indonesia or the Philippines or the country is exceptionally large with isolated densely populated cities like Australia. Or it is sparsely settled like Alaska's coast which has no significant land infrastructure like roads or gas pipes to serve as telecom rights of way.  Unitirreno belongs to the former category. This SDM (spatial division multiplexing) 24 fibre pair cable will link Italy's principal territories, the Boot, Sicily, and Sardinia. The design throughput per fibre pair is 20 terabits or 480 terabits per second for the cable. Unitirreno, if built, will be a very high capacity system. Nearly half a petabit.  Here is the company's key sales pitch and commercial justifications: 1. Unitirreno cuts the latency in half between Sicily and Genoa and provides a completely diverse path to the terre

Transmission Co is a new Lagos metro network with fibre between the three key data centers of OADC, Rack Centre, and MDXI Equinix. It is currently expanding into another three sites. This network is amplified in order to ensure high performance for 400G and 800G wavelengths. We can offer you metro wavelengths between these three data on-net facilities configured as a ring at excellent pricing with significant term and volume discounts. Also available are spectrum and alien waves. Mark Tinka, former head of Seacom engineering, is the founder and CEO. I work directly with him on sales opportunities. Mark is well known and respected in the Internet engineering community. We can be reached at roderick.beck@networksourcing.net.  The best way to think about spectrum is that it is a virtual fibre pair. If you take 100 Gigahertz on the network, then you feed it into your DWDM gear and carve it up and frame as OTN circuits. In this case you can get a 400G wavelength or several 100G waves if yo

This post summarizes many of the key concerns you must keep in mind when in purchasing 2africa capacity. Obviously, the more capacity a vendor has, the lower it can go on price.  In the major telecom hubs like South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, 2Africa providers typically have fibre to at least one carrier neutral data centre or the CLS itself is in a telecom hotel.  So the minefield of the opportunistic African cable landing station operator can be avoided. Indeed, in many of those countries the CLS itself is really just a cage or a room in a carrier neutral data center just like the Equiano CLS in the Open Access Data Centre in Lagos.  Buyers must be much more careful in the secondary markets. In some of those markets the 2Africa cable has no back haul to telecom hotels and the CLS is revamping itself or portraying itself as a carrier neutral site in accordance with the 2Africa consortium's open cable model. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating as the English say. It is n

Technology: Standard 100G wave coherent optics. Shorter repeater spacings to maximize per fibre pair throughput.  Fibre Pairs: 8.  Founding Fathers: Facebook and Microsoft Consortium Members: Facebook, Microsoft, and Telxius.  RFS: May, 2018.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Spain.  Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Bilbao, Spain.  Notable Features: First cable to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Also first cable to adopt the open cable system model where each consortium member selects their own submarine line termination gear and owns either fibre pairs or spectrum.  Potential Throughput: 224 Tbps.  Marea is the first cable to give the cold shoulder to New York City and the UK. It directly links Ashburn Equinix via a Virginia Beach landing to Continental Europe with a Spanish landing. The cable completely bypasses the UK and the Northeastern US. This reflected Ashburn Equinix' rising importance and the desire of network planners  to avoid NYC with its complex conduit systems

Marseille/Singapore; AAE1 cable; 10G wavelength; $3,200 MRC; 2 year term.  London/Singapore Overland; SG/HK/China/Kazakhstan/Bellarus/Poland/Germany/London;  full GigE; $8,000 MRC; 185 ms RTD.  LD4 Equinix/AM5 Amsterdam; Scylla Cable; 100G Wave; 1,100€ MRC; low latency path; 3 year term.  Milano/Palermo; 100G Wave; 2,000€ MRC; 3 year term.  Lisbon Equinix/Capetown Teraco; Equiano Cable; 100G Wave; $32K MRC; 3 years.  CLS Japan/CLS Oregon; Faster Cable; 100G Wave; $13,500 MRC; 1 year term.  Ashburn Equinix/Telehouse 2 Paris; 100G Wave; Dunant Cable; $5750 MRC; 3 year term.  Dallas Equinix/Ashburn Equinix; 100G Wave; $2,400 MRC; 3 year term.  Ashburn Equinix/Secaucus Equinix; 100G Wave; $1,900 MRC; 3 year term.  Ashburn Equinix/San Jose Equinix; 100G Wave; $2,950 MRC; 3 year term.  Ashburn Equinix/Miami M1 Equinix; 100G Wave; $1,950 MRC; 3 year term.  Secaucus Equinix/Coresite LA2; 100G Wave; $3,950; 3 year term. 

Technology: Spatial division multiplexing.  Fibre Pairs: 12.  Founding Father: Google Consortium Members: Google & Orange. The French PTT is best described as a junior partner.  RFS: January, 2021.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Paris. Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Saint-Hillaire-de-Riez.  Notable Features: Second cable after Marea to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Dunant was first subsea network  in the world to deploy spatial division multiplexing and and achieve a two digit fibre pair count.  Dunant was the beginning of the spatial division multiplexing revolution. It was the first cable to leapfrog from the standard 4 to 8 fibre pair coherent optics paradigm for the Atlantic to the 12 to 32 pair spatial division multiplexing model that dominates today. Dunant went live January 19, 2021 with 12 fibre pairs and lit capacity of 250 terabits per second. However, the design capacity was even higher, 300 Tbps. The cable is named after the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant

The simple truth is that 99% of all RFPs are market data gathering expeditions. What most buyers want are crazy low prices that they can take back to the incumbent provider, wave triumphantly in their face, and use to negotiate new, more favorable contracts. The new carrier kid on the block has no real chance of grabbing a slice of the pie. Or the RFP is simply a way to update their understanding of market pricing. Often an annual exercise done at the same time of every year. Vendors who participate in these annual rites are simply providing free consulting. It is a waste of their pricing department's time.  RFPs are an excellent way of alienating smart vendors who realize their chances of winning business are low due to the horde of carriers bidding for the purported business. I say 'purported' because most of the time only a fraction of the RPF circuits requests are purchased. If an RFP is sent to 40 carriers, the vast majority of participants will be disappointed and ine

This new subsea cable perfectly illustrates how these undersea digital highways have become instruments of political power and foreign policy. The Chinese government is lending the Cambodian government the money required to build a subsea cable that China Uncom will operate for Cambodia and which Hauwei Marine will undoubtedly build. Since it goes to Hong Kong China will probably tap the cable and record the bits traversing it. Now encryption protects the data payload, but not the header routing information. So the IP addresses can be captured and much can be deduced from them. Unfortunately, few details are available regarding the new network. The Chinese government clearly wants to be able to monitor and capture the region's data flows so subsidizing cables to land in China and to be built by Hauwei is in their eyes is simply prudent national security policy. 

Transmission Technology: Spatial Division Multiplexing.  Length: 16,026 kilometers. Almost 10,000 US miles. Consortium Members: Google and Facebook. Type of Consortium: Open cable model.  Construction Status: Behind schedule due to permitting delays for Indonesian waters. Fifty-fifty control probably also slowed decision making.  Number of Fibre Pairs: Main trunk has 12. Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2025. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 144 Tbps.  Salient Features: First low latency, direct cable between Singapore and USA with no intermediate breakouts. One Indonesian branching unit. No telecom carrier consortium members. Amazon and Facebook land the cable themselves in Singapore and California.  Google announced  announced the 12 fibre pair SDM Echo project in early 2021 with a planned 2023 launch. However, permitting delays have slowed construction and the project is now expected to be RFS 2025. In addition, it is highly plausible that the 50-50 Facebook/Google control split sl

Type of Cable System: Repeated Two-Core Fibre Pairs With Coherent Optics  Consortium Members: Independent Operator. Construction Status: Design and Fund Raising Stage.  Number of Fibre Pairs: 48.  Number of Cores Per Fibre: 2. Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2027. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 13 Pbps.  Salient Features: 48 Pair repeatered cable directly linking UK, Norway, Demark, Germany, and Netherlands. Every fibre optic path is direct and involves no third country transit. Each fibre pair strand has two optical cores instead of the standard one.  Supplier: NEC. Only NEC offers multicore fibre strands and 48 pair repeaters.  I interviewed today one of the project's founders, Eckhard Bruckshen. The IOEMA cable is designed to reduce the dependence of European telecommunications traffic on the Denmark bottleneck as the map below illustrates. Today Denmark is the primary telecom bridge between the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland (also the Baltic States) and the re

I joined AT&T in 1992 and did statistical forecasting of industry aggregates like voice traffic measured in minutes of use. That experience informed my view that big companies are necessary evils - necessary in that network economies of scale are real, but evil in the sense that governance by consensus results in mediocrity. I eventually ended up doing Layer 1 capcity sales agency work for Tyco Submarine's own network which was eventually sold to Tata Communications. Under Eric Gutshall's tutelage I learned the fundamental of sales including 'quick and accurate quotes' and never losing on price unless the rate of return was too low. Later I worked for him at Hibernia Atlantic whose network is depicted below. Today these five cables are part of EXA Infrastructure and really their crown jewels.  I am not a reseller. If you accept a network capacity proposal, your contract and service is with the underlying network operator who typically owns fibre or IRUs on fibre or

Type of Cable System: Spatial Division Multiplexing.  Consortium Members: Amazon, Facebook, Keppel, and Telin. Construction Status: Behind schedule due to permitting delays for Indonesian waters.  Number of Fibre Pairs: Main trunk has 12. Some branches have 6.  Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2025. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 125 Tbps.  Salient Features: First low latency, three digit terabit cable between Singapore and USA.  Bifrost is the name of the burning rainbow bridge that connects Earth to the Realm of the Gods in Norse mythology. This new 12 fibre pair system is a wide lane digital bridge between Southeast Asia and North America (lands in the US and Mexico). It is the first direct single subsea cable solution connecting Singapore, Indonesia, and Philippines to North America that does not touch China or Hong Kong. The key consortium members include Facebook, Telin, Keppel (a new subsea player providing the Singapore landing), and Amazon. Singtel has some lit capacity on the

Key Observations Lots of Faster cable capacity available. Third fastest Japan/US sysrem. TY4/1 Wilshire or CLS/DC combinations available. Figure $13.5 MRC to $17.5K MRC depending on exact end points on a 1 year contract.  Chinese carriers dominate AAE1 and they report no capacity left. Other Asian carriers were reselling Chinese capacity. Hence their cupboards are now bare as well.  Only 10G capacity available. SMW5 is also almost fully depleted. At this point it is a so-called 'diversity play' for AAE1. Despite the tight Red Sea lane fit and the fact that Egypt is single point of failure.  Peace cable is not ready til 1Q2025, but pricing is available and orders are being taken. One SVP of sales told me that Peace will put downward pressure on the Marseille/Singapore route. I do think that will happen, but not by itself. It is Peace plus SWM6 that will temporarily lower prices. Temporary because AAE1 and SWM5 are depleted, but demand is steadily growing. No end to the demand ts

Cables: Jupiter or Faster. Term: 1 Year. A point: TY4 data centre, Tokyo.  Z point: Coresite, 1 Wilshire LA.  MRC: $18.5K. NRC: $15K. Customer responsible for cross connects.  Remarks:   1. Jupiter and Faster are the second and third lowest latency cables linking Tokyo and LA, respectively. Unity holds the first position.  2. CLS to CLS, CLS to DC, and DC to CLS also options. And less expensive. 3. Volume and Term Discounts.  Jupiter Cable Logical Map Faster Cable Map

The Andromeda cable will link Greece, Cyprus, and Israel with cable landing stations at Korakia, Greece, and Tirat Carmel, Israel. The plan is to extend the subsea cable across Israel to the important Aqaba, Jordan, and Haqi, Saudi Arabia data centers. Apparently via the existing oil pipeline that transports oil from the Red Sea to Israel. This Israel cooperation with Arab countries reflects the ongoing rapprochement between the former enemies. Andromeda, if built, will provide much needed physical diversity and cost savings by bypassing Egypt, which most Europe-Asia cables use despite Telecom Egypt's very high transit fees.  Tamares Telecom owns the Tamares North cable connecting Israel with Cyprus and I believe that Andromeda will take this existing subsea infrastructure and extend it to Greece. However, it is worth noting that neither Tamares Telecom nor its Greek partner Grid Telecom (the wholesale subsidiary of a Greek power transmission company) have announced a subsea constr

Type of Cable System: Latest Generation Coherent Optics.  Open Cable System: Yes, and possibly the first for Southeast Asia.  Consortium Members: China Telecom, Singtel, Globe Telecom (Philippines), DITO (Philippines), Singtel, Malaysia Telecom, Global Transit, and UNN (Brunei).  Construction Status: On schedule.  Number of Fibre Pairs: 8.  Estimated RFS: 3Q2025. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 144 Tbps.  Salient Features: Three digit terabit cable between Singapore, China, HK, Malaysia, Vietname, and Philippines.  ALC connects Brunei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, and China. It is a 8 fibre pair system with minimum throughput per pair of 18 terabits per second. Hauwei Marine is building the system which should be ready for service 3Q2025. The project co-leads are Singtel and China Telecom. Hauwei's involvement will deter many foreign carriers from using the cable's transport services, but there are extensive commercial  ties and strong telecom traffic flows between Singapor