The New Subsea Cables RFS 2025 Series: Bifrost

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 system as well. A Phillipine carrier, Converge, has purchased a fibre pair IRU on the Philippine branch plus the main Singapore/USA trunk. Amazon operates one of the US cable landing stations. In return, it will undoubtedly get some lit capacity. 

Up to now the standard Pacific path for traffic to North America has been via Japan which connects to the US using the PC1, Faster, Unity, and Jupiter cables. This indirect routing dramatically increases latency as Southeast Asian traffic is sent North to Japan before heading East to the States. It also increases cost because two cables must be used to ferry the traffic. Each subsea cable has its own termination equipment, NOC, marine repair contract, and other fixed costs that must be covered by the transport pricing. So the more cables, the higher the total price tag even if the total distance is unchanged. Finally, the more complicated the routing, the greater the risk of network failure. Traffic between Singapore and the US today must first ride a subsea cable to a Japanese CLS and then either be tranferred directly to another CLS for the final hop to the US or traverse Japan to a Tokyo data center where via a cross connect it is delivered to a cable capacity owner and then back to a CLS for the final subsea leg. The more steps involved, the greater the likelihood of an outage. Simplicity minimizes the number of things that can go wrong. 

Bifrost's direct US path guarantees it will be the lowest latency between Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia and the US. It would be even lower if the South China Sea was not off limits. Furthermore, at 10.4 terabits per pair Bifrost can transmit 124.8 Tbps using current technology. This places the network in the  'Bandwidth Leviathan' category which I define as any subsea network whose initial design capacity is 100 Tbps or greater. Its high capacity reduces the likelihood of the perennial shortage and upgrades cycles which has plagued other Asian subsea cables like AAE1 and should also ensure attractive pricing for wholesale customers. Converge has purchased a fibre pair IRU and has publicly asserted that 15 Tbps a pair is doable today. This implies the cable's potential bandwidth is at least 180 Tbps. Comparable to 2Africa. 

Map of the Bifrost Subsea cable.




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