Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

- Never too late in the year to do a deal. Just booked an Amsterdam dark fibre ring deal for an ISP. I enjoy nurturing the up and coming ISP Giants of Tomorrow. The Goliath slayers.  - Great dark fibre ring pricing (400€ MRC) on three year terms. That means two dark fibre pairs diversely routed end-to-end between most key Amsterdam DCs.  - On-net data Amsterdam data centres: AM1, AM2, AM3, AM4, AM5, AM6, AM7, AM8, AM11, Nikhef, Iron Mountain, Global Switch West, Global Switch East, Interxion, Science Park 120 Science Park 121. PS: Fiberring is not the provider. 

Optical wavelengths are composed of fundamental building blocks known as containers. The industry has recognized that current wavelength transmission rates are too chunky. There are limited number of sizes with many customers struggling to justify the leap from 100G to the relatively new 400G standard. On the supplier side the limited size of wavelengths can lead to stranded spectrum. For example, you might have enough spectrum for 5G or 150G or 650G. In all these cases the stranded capacity represents lost revenue in a cut throat, ferociously competitive wholesale market.  The ODUflex standard was introduced in part to create wavelengths below the 2.5G level. The fundamental ODU building block is a 1.25Gbps transmission rate. ODU means optical data unit. But let's assume you divide each second into time slots for 80 ODU units per second. Well, that is a 100G transmission rate. Want a 150G wavelength? Interweave 120 ODUs. So now Layer 1 granularity becomes a reality. One customer a...

Dutch governments need to stop being wimps and let the data centre industry grow. There is a moratorium on Amsterdam data centre build permits as well as power upgrades. Government leaders are supposed to lead, not cower in their offices afraid of public opinion. I have clients who cannot colocate in Amsterdam facilities such as AM5 because no spare power capacity is available. The Dutch government should long term add nuclear facilities to handle growing long term power demand and beef up the transmission networks as opposed to public-pleasing moratoriums on data centre building. Or pushing solar panels for a wet and rainy climate at high latitude. Picture below of AM5, one of the best peering points in the Netherlands. Clock on  https://thetechcapital.com/a-regulatory-chokehold-is-suffocating-amsterdams-data-centre-growth/ . 

The telecom industry is gently nudging our fearful government leaders who think Russian incompetence has reached the point that they would use a Chinese cargo ship and its anchor for sabotage. I strongly urge the Russian intelligence to sue Western leaders for slandering their professional competency.  If Russia wanted to damage a subsea cable, they would use timer charges and the ship's crew would be a thousand miles away in Moscow drinking vodka and feasting on Beluga caviar when it exploded. Just like the Ukrainian special forces which probably blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline to ensure all Russian gas to Europe goes through the Ukraine. They rented a Russian ship which was over 800 kilometers away in international waters when the charges were triggered. See https://blog.telegeography.com/what-to-know-about-submarine-cable-breaks? for the full article. 

1. Equiano 100G; LS1, Lisbon/OADC, Lagos; $18.5K MRC; Two Year Term. 2. WACS 100G; LS1/Abidjan CLS; $34.5K MRC; Three Year Term. 3. Equiano 100G; LS1/Capetown Terraco; $20.5K MRC; Two Year Term. 4. 2Africa 100G; LS1/2Africa CLS, Congo; $38.5K MRC, Three Year Term. 5. Route Protected 100G; Capetown CT1-CT2/JB2; $7,800 MRC; Three Year Term.

BW Group purchased the Hawaiki cable in July, 2021 from the Hawaiki Submarine Cable Limited Partnership. The Partnership's original plan was to build a sister cable known as Hawaiki Nui (Great Hawaiki). BW, a Singapore company, has pursued this idea and finally signed earlier this year a Memorandum Of Understanding with TELIN, the international cable subsidiary of the Indonesian PTT. The MOU is really the partnership or consortium agreement and typically only happens once funding has been secured and all parties are fully onboard. It is the point of no return. The fact that Hawaiki Nui cable was announced in 2021 and just achieved the critical MOU milestone tells me that it has been very difficult to get this project off the ground. My speculation is that the cable will be very expensive because it requires deep burial in such shallow waters; moreover, very expensive marine survey is a necessity. Furthermore, the cable's route requires  Indonesia permitting, which ha...

Sources tell me that the Iceland Iris cable was originally a Vodafone project that FARICE effectively highjacked. FARICE is a government-owned telecom incumbent with limited regulatory oversight due to legal loopholes. Indeed, Vodafone even built a data center in Reykjavik to serve as the cable landing station that the data center company Borealis eventually bought after Vodafone gave up on the subsea cable project. FARICE used its control of telecom infrastructure to block Vodafone. Here is the initial Vodafone project announcement: https://lnkd.in/d2aYnWnJ. Emerald was Vodafone's name for a high capacity cable project that would connect the US to Ireland and including an Iceland branch. After the branch was dropped, Aquacomms finished the project under the name of AEC-1. The projects reflects the insider nature of Icelandic society. Because Iceland has only 400,000 people competition in many industries is limited and everyone knows everyone and everything. For example, a handful...

Google is leading a project to create two new subsea cables collectively known as Australia Connect. Its partners include the entrepreneurial Subco , Vocus, and NextDC. Subco is a private operator of subsea cables. It owns the Oman-Australia cable and the SMAP cable that when finished will connect Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. Vocus is a competitive Australian carrier. I strongly suspect the Australian and US militaries are silent partners in the cable for reasons I outline below. The Bosun cable will link Darwin on Australia's Northern Coast to Christmas Island and then continue onward to Singapore. The Interlink cable connects Sydney to Perth and Perth up to Christmas Island. This project has military written all over it because Christmas Island could be used as a surveillance node for the US-Australian-Japanese military alliance. Equipped with radar the island can survey the the Southern approaches to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. The fact that the island is gett...

Both cables has been repaired, namely the one connecting Lithuania to Sweden and the C-Lion system as well. The emerging consensus within the European subsea cable community is that the German, Finnish, and Estonian authorities are wrong in claiming sabotage. Anchor dragging is a very crude form of sabotage and in this case the Chinese ship Li Peng crossed 13 cables and only damaged two. Secondly, a key requirement of sabotage is a safe get away. A heavy, slow cargo ship is not a good getaway car. Furthermore, the European press got it wrong when it claimed the ship captain is Russian. It is a Chinese ship with a Chinese captain. I have written an article explaining why the sabotage accusations are so flimsy in my opinion: https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/11/american-officials-say-no-sabotage-in.html. The ship dragged its anchor probably to steady itself in bad weather and turned off the transponder because the captain knew what it was doing was irresponsible. I suspect the l...

A subsea cable is like a long piece of string. Except the world's cables total about 1.5 million kilometers. Anything shaped like that is inherently indefensible. The Big Huff and Puff is that if we place sensors on or near the cables, presto, problem solved. Not a chance. All it takes is a technologically sophisticated and patient adversary to send out unmanned drones to locate the cables in deep sea where they lie exposed on the ocean's floor. Record the coordinates or drop a homing beacon. When the war is about to go from cold to hot, release underwater drones with charges to attach themselves to these cables and blow them up.  Sensors are of limited value because no country or military alliance has sufficient vessels to station them close enough to every point of possible attack. What is the point of a warning if it is too late to avert the attack? The invention of radar did not stop air strikes or render air power useless. Satellites can give 30 minutes warning of a nuclea...