Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Obviously the new Equiano and 2Africa cables will dramatically improve African network reliabilty. In fact, Equiano provided a huge amount of restoration capacity for Internet backbones that lost European connectivity during the four cable outage off Abidjan this past spring. As long as the network operator could get their traffic to Lagos or South Africa, they could get hop onto Equiano and reach Europe.  Long term there are two primary ways to create a more resilient pan-African network. The Continent needs large fibre optic interstate highways connecting countries. The challenge is that most landlocked African states have not truly liberalized their markets to allow internal competition, foreign ownership or even cross border fibre ownership. Landline monopoly is the rule in these countries. For example, today, the only way to link Burkino Faso fibre to its Ivory Coast counterpart is via a border cross connect. There is no cross border fibre ownership permitted. This is a serious dr

In the last 8 months there have been three separate incidents demonstrating the extreme fragility of the African telecommunications industry. The Red Sea outages included EIG, which has some Northeast African landings. There was a two cable outage near South Africa's coastal waters and then there was the very painful four cable outage right off Abdijan, Côte d'Ivoire, which severely disrupted voice and data traffic within Africa and also between Africa and Europe.  The common thread is a lack of professionalism. In the case of the West African outage, all four of the cables (SAT-3, WACS, MainOne, and ACE) were placed within the Le Trou Sans Fin (hole without a bottom) subsea canyon. This canyon is well known for debris slides. Yet it did not stop four consortiums from using it. The risk was ignored. Undoubtedly, the consortiums will blame the Ivory Coast PTT for placing the landing station right on Abidjan's beaches. But a subsea cable network is never just the wet segment.

SEA-H2X: A Mystery Player Among Subsea Cables This cable is very under the radar. Very few industry insiders ever mention it. Yet, it is not an insignificant project. The main 8 fibre pair trunk directly connects Singapore and Hong Kong. It uses branching units to extend the cable to Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, and a free trade Chinese port city known as Hainan. Hauwei Marine built it with advanced branching units that include optical switching as well as flexible power distribution. The cable's design capacity is 180 Tbps. At 20 Tbps a pair, I suspect there is upside throughput potential.  Interestingly enough, it is an open cable system so each consortium member selects and buys their own submarine line termination gear which I assume includes the DWDM kit. This helps to some extent alleviate the concern that Chinese security agencies have compromised the system. But there are other ways of eavesdropping other than infiltrating the terminal gear even though that is the best

The director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Defense Department decided in 1966 to create a research network connecting the big main frames at US universities. By this point the first book at packet switching had already been published. Furthermore, it was quite clear that the universities would benefit from directly sending data from one mainframe to another without sending a tape disk via the postal service. The first computer network was the project's animating vision. Research in this context meant two things. The network itself would be a test bed for new networking ideas about how computers could directly talk to each other. Secondly, it was hoped that academics and scientists would demonstrate the Arpanet's value by using it to further their research. It is hard to exaggerate how challenging computing was in the beginning. The ARPA director, Robert Taylor, had three computer terminals in his office linked via dedicated 56 kilobit lines to the three comput

A Brief History of the Internet's Origins - First Steps The Internet has evolved constantly from the time that US universities first connected using 56 kilobyte connections and began sending electronic messages. In the late 1950s US computer researchers were looking for a way to connect the computers at American universities which were often separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. Many felt that a new idea, packet switching, was vastly superior to standard telephone voice circuits. Packet switching was a better fit for time sharing computers and offered a way to interleave data from many users into a single data stream. Using a dedicated telephony circuit for each application data stream was highly inefficient.  In the early 60s J.C.R. Licklider at MIT proposed the idea of a 'Galactic Network'. This global network would allow any connected computer to send and receive data. Every user could access data and programs from any connected site. Licklider eventually became h

The IRU price should reflect your forecast of future lease revenes. If the current MRC is high and prices have been stable and are expected to remain so, then the opportunity cost of selling an IRU is high. You are sacrificing a lot of lease revenue if you sell that capacity. In this case the upfront IRU price should equal the three year MRC multipled by 4 to 6 years. So if the three year Faster cable MRC is $17K, then 48x to 72x times that number is fair value. So 48*$17K=$816K. Plus a standard 4% annual fee to cover the wavelength's share of maintenance and operations.. So strong markets and tight capacity mean that leasing is more attractive than IRUs to the supplier. Vice versa, the buyers will be desperate to lower their long term costs via an IRU. In my example, $816K divided by 15 years equates to $4500 per month excluding O&M. Bad for the seller. Good for the buyer. That's why so many of you are looking for IRU capacity to resell to your clients, but finding few se

In the earliest fibre optic cable systems there were no optical amplifiers, but rather repeaters which converted the optical signal to a digital representation which the repeater laser translated back into a fresh new optical signal. In other words, these repeaters had small computers which converted the laser signal into zeros and ones and put them into the laser's buffer.  The repeater had a fixed transmission rate and generally it was necessary to buy the repeaters and optical cable landing station equipment from the same vendor to ensure interoperability. So undersea repeaters were not technology agnostic; moreover,  they had a fixed transmission rate that effectively made upgrading  a subsea cable to higher throughput impossible. Finally, the need to buy both wet and dry plant from the same vendor limited price competition. This is a severe disadvantage when each new generation of optical technology is reaching the market at approximately 18 months intervals. Furthermore, the

This article illustrates the challenges in laying fibre optic subsea cables. Zayo found 3 unexploded bombs in British territorial waters and one on the Dutch side during its Zeus cable build across the English Channel. I guess the Netherlands is doing better than Brexit UK because the Dutch navy removed the bomb while Zayo was required to hire private third parties to remove the other 3. 😀 There were also over 350 potential archeological sites that had to be examined prior to the cable run. Zayo viewed building Zeus as a necessity given the advanced age of the North Circe cable (22 years now) and the fact it was tapped out. This has been my point as well. These English Channel cables are approach life's end either due to optical loss accumulating from many repairs or simple technological obsolescence. However, the article's writer goes a little overboard in claiming that a ship anchor would bounce off Zeus' double armored cable. I am highly confident it would go right thr

Common Ownership of Data Centers and Subsea Cables V.tal is a South American data center company that is working closely with the South American cable, Globenet, which connects New York to Brazil. An infrastructure fund owns both companies. The Globenet system is heavily used for low latency trading as it has one of the shortest paths to Fortaleza, Brazil. From Fortaleza the low latency trading networks that serve the financial industry (high frequency traders) go overland to the Brazilian stock exchange data center, B3, which is in within spitting distance of the Equinix SP4 facility.  There is a growing trend for new data center companies to become involved in building or affiliated with subsea cables. This ensures that their new, often remote data centers have big bandwidth pipes into them. It is a tricky balance because a new high capacity cable cannot be successful just by connecting new, largely empty data centers. It is important for the cable to divide itself into several back

1. The last 2Africa splice should happen in December and the cable is likely to be fully live April, 2025. Not surprising given this is the most complicated submarine cable project ever undertaken with over 40 landings and many new cable landing stations. Right now only the Kenya to South Africa segment is live.  2. Blue-Raman is farther out than many Blue-Raman providers are willing to admit. Not 2nd quarter next year. But year's end for the all-important Marseille/Mumbai segment. Don't be fooled. Salesmen are Liars. 😀 Except for me, of course. 😊 3. I can sell you 5x 100Gs on any of the three Equiano segments today and three months down the road will have 25x 100Gs available on the Equiano cable. Plus I have affordable local loops from Lagos OADC to the other two key Lagos data centers. Moreover, the metro fibre is amplified which is important for ensuring acceptable 400G and 800G wave performance. Most Lagos