Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The 12 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable is a sign of our times. It links together Japan, Taiwan, Guam, Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia, but excludes Hong Kong and China on security grounds. Consistent with these geopolitical concerns, the cable's main trunk bypasses the South China Sea where China is demanding permit applications (which often exceed a year to get approved), can easily tap cables, and has created artificial military island bases. In a military conflict the fifteen cables traversing the the South China Sea would be at risk. Instead, Apricot takes a long route via Indonesian waters in order to head North along the Philippines' East Coast. The cable's design reflects the potential threat that an aggressive China in conflict with the Philippines and Taiwan poses to Southeast Asian telecommunications.  Although latency is much higher, Apricot offers attractive physical diversity because it avoids the cable congested South China Sea, includes a...

The 12 fibe pair Echo subsea cable aptly illustrates how American Digital Giants are increasingly dominating the Pacific subsea telecommunications market. Carrier consortiums have largely controlled the region's connectivity up to now with the last notable project being the Jupiter cable (RFS 2021) connecting Tokyo to Los Angeles. Google's first solo project was the 16 pair Topaz cable RFS 2024 that directly links Tokyo to Vancouver from where the rest of Canada can be served or the traffic sent South to Seattle. Going forward Google and Facebook own and control all the planned major new cables over the next several years connecting the Asia Rim to the US. Amazon and Microsoft are silient minority investors as well in many of them. Echo is the first cable to seamlessly connect the Singapore telecom hub to the West Coast. Hong Kong and Tokyo were the Pacific Rim's primary telecom hubs up to 2015. But Singapore has seized Hong Kong's telecom crown. This reflects several f...

The 2Africa cable is one of the most ambitious and important subsea projects ever undertaken. It spans a record 45,000 kilometers or 28,000 US miles. As the map shows, it extends from Mumbai to London with many European landings, completely encircles Africa, and provides dense Middle Eastern coverage. 2Africa has a record 46 landings which enables it to serve 33 countries across Europe, Middle East, and  Africa. It also serves India and Pakistan. The cable is unique in having many landings in several countries including 4 in Egypt, 4 in Saudi Arabia, and 4 in South Africa as well as 2 in Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Spain. A signature theme of the 2Africa project is improving network uptime through physical diversity in the form of multipe, widely separated new landings in key countries. For example, the subsea network brings much needed diversity to Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure with the first CLS outside Lagos several hundred kilometers to the Southeast. The othe...

Google's Firmina is South America's first spatial division multiplexing cable. It is Google's third South American cable after Curie and Monet. Spatial division multiplexing maximizes total cable throughput by adding more fibre pairs as opposed to maximizing per pair throughput. The result is 12 to 32 pairs per cable versus 2 to 8 for conventional systems. A SDM cable will run each pair at 12 to 20 Tbps versus a conventional cable at 25 Tbps or slightly higher. Firmina has 16 fibre pairs with initial 320 Tbps capacity. It is the highest capacity cable to serve South America and dwarfs the rest of the subsea networks.  Firmina illustrates the rising dominance of the American tech companies in the subsea cable world. These companies account for 50% to 80% of global traffic. They build their own cables as opposed to leasing capacity because it reduces cost per bit. Moreover, complete network control and transparency leads to better performance in terms of uptime and latency. T...

Meta's Anjana cable sets an Atlantic bandwidth record with 24 fibre pairs each transmitting 20 terabits per second for a total of nearly a half petabit. This huge capacity reflects its spatial division multiplexing (SDM) design. Traditional subsea cable designs maximize capacity per pair, but this leads to nonlinear signal distortions once a threshold is exceeded. Hence additional power to boost the rate above the threshold yields only small gains. This inefficient use of power limits fiber pair counts to 8 or less per cable with most cables rarely exceeding 150 Tbps. In contast, SDM increases the total bandwidth punch by operating each pair at lower transmission rates to avoid these nonlinear signal distortions. In turn, the lower transmission rates free up power to support enough more pairs to sharply raise total cable throughput, which ranges from 200 Tbps to a half petabit per second.  Another notable feature of Anjana is that it lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Santa...

The Tech Giant has announced it will spend $700 million building data centers in Poland to provide cloud and AI services. This investment is in addition to the existing three Microsoft data centers in the Warsaw cloud region. Price tag for those three data centers was a billion dollars. Poland and fellow former Iron Curtain countries comprise the EU's poorest region.  Microsoft's deal appears to be motivated in large part by strong regional demand for cybersecurity services given those pesky Russian hackers many of whom work under contract for Russia's Federal Security Agency.  Russian cyber attacks  against Eastern European states are common. In particular, the Baltic states have been hard hit. Putin has openly expressed the desire to create a greater Russia consisting of Russian speaking peoples and the Baltics have significant Russian minorities.  I am not an expert, but I am not aware of any existing Eastern European hyperscaler facilities outside of Microsoft's ...

Mombasa/Dar es Salaam; $15,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Mombasa/Djibouti; $15,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Mombasa/Amanzimtoti; $18,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Capetown/Amanzimtoti; $10,900; 1 Year; 2Africa.

This past autumn I did a post based on two insider conversations about an under-the-radar Facebook cable that would span the world with a W shape. I was told the cable would directly dconnect the US to South Africa and then head straight to India and onward to Australia before landing on the West Coast of the US. My theory at the time was that this was an AI driven project since the routing really didn't match Internet traffic flows or did not connect to major Internet exchange points (like Singapore) even though the route passes by them. The purported route latencies would be quite high which discourages carrier interest in purchasing capacity on the system.  So I figured its purpose was to move 'Big Data'. I am surprised to say I was right.  The one deviation from my initial understanding is that the 24 fibre pair cable will land in Brazil before veering for South Africa. A Brazil landing makes perfect sense in retrospect because Facebook's current capacity down to So...

Best metro dark fibre pricing for London. A fully diverse dark fibre ring as low as 952 Euros per month or 752 British pounds with two to three week provisioning. No install on three year terms. Customer responsible for cross connects. The usual suspects are as high as 1500 Euros with 1 to 2 month delivery. Accept Nothing Less Than The Best. 

 My calculations indicate that at least 2.5 Petabits per second of new subsea cable transmission capacity landing in Europe over the next few years. Note that this is initial capacity, and undoubtedly, there will be upgrades in due time. Below is my calculation. The Amazon project is stealth at this time and I assumed a lower bound of 100 Tbps. Consider the Initial Capacity of New And Pending Cables: 1. Equiano: 144 Tbps. Live 2023. 2. 2Africa: 180 Tbps. Live 2025. 3. Blue-Raman: 218 Tbps. Live 2026. 4. Anjana: 480 Tbps. Live 2026.  5. Nuvem: 384 Tbps. Live 2027. 6. Medusa: 480 Tbps. Live 2025.  7. Africa-1: 160 Tbps. Live 2025. 8. Peace. 192 Tbps. Live December 2024. 9. SWM6: 125 Tbps. Live early 2026. 10. New Amazon Cable: US/Ireland. 2028. At least 100 Tbps. Total: 2.5 Petabits Per Second Initial Capacity.

The Quantum Internet means among other things that if the NSA or Chinese state hackers try to eavesdrop on a communication link, the link immediately collapses. It's the ultimate in security because the information is stored in quantum states, but quantum states collapse when measured by third parties. The no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics says that quantum states cannot be copied so a third party cannot eavesdrop on a two party link. There is no way to copy the quantum state in which information is encoded and if you try so, the communication link vanishes. In other words, surveillance destroys the information it wants to copy and the link going down informs the two parties communicating that the link has been compromsed. 😃 Good riddance, Big Brother. The presenter is an Australian physicist who provides a good, but highly detailed explanation of how quantum mechanics works and why it will one day transform the Internet. Fasten your seat belts because Matt does not dumb thi...

Vienna, the seat of the old Hapsburg Empire, is a telecom bridge between East and West Europe as well as Southern and Northern Europe. Linear dark fibre pairs are available for 350 Euros a month on 3 year contracts. Discounts available for big deals and the key Interxion data center is on-net. Two to three week delivery is standard. Distinguished network consultant and engineer Jürgen Jaritsch is local and can help you on your journey. He has a strong operaational background in ISP engineering. 

Chile's government is investigating the idea of linking Chile to Antarctica via a subsea cable. This is part of a larger initiative to make Chile a major telecom and data center hub. Its government is partnering with Google on the Humboldt cable that will connect Australia to Chile with branching units to important Pacific island chains like French Polynesia and Fiji. Pioneer Consulting, a very well known and respected subsea cable design company based in New Jersey, will do the feasibility study. Antarctica has a number of research stations including America's National Science Foundation's McMurdo facility. Web cam photo of the station below as of 11:30 AM CET. Here is a link to a relevant article . These research sites definitely need more bandwidth than they currently get via geostationary satellite providers and Starlink's LEO service. Not clear if they are willing to pay enough to justify building the proposed Antarctic cable. A big concern is ice scouring. This is...

Pay salesmen low salaries and 5% to 10% of on-net revenue. A good salesman does not need a high salary. He or she achieves high income by selling. It is what they enjoy doing. This is the standard Wall Street broker compensation package. New brokers end up sharing apartments with lots of other brokers and commuting from New Jersey. Real sales meritocracy is pay for performance.  Profits are not maximized by paying a high salary combined with low commission rates, and high quotas. It simply creates huge staff turnover as people charm themselves into a high paying job, produce only one or two deals over their first six to 12 months, and then jump ship just before they are going to fired. I have seen it happen time and time again. The empty suit charmers. The resume red flag is a sales guy or gal moving from carrier to carrier every 1 to 2 years. The resulting churn from these bad apples dramatically lowers sales revenue per employee. Plus it rewards a few select salesmen who were luc...

Right now EUNetworks is clearly the best carrier for Layer 1 Western European network capacity. I work on a daily basis with them. The carrier offers the best combination of performance, price, and commercial flexibility. They are my default go-to provider. Note they offer wavelengths, spectrum, and metro dark fibre among other services. For ISPs they offer lower latency general bandwidth routes than their competitors. This is a big deal for African and Asian ISPs who already endure high latency to the distances between Europe and these other continents. Their new Digital Super Highways are quite attractive. These massive upgrades of the standard Western Europe routes give them a distinct edge over the 2000 era networks of their competitors. Arelion is the best transit provider, but Hurricane Electric should be a part of the upstream mix as well. RETN also has good transit. All three are in the top 15 ASN ranking which is a measure of the number of BGP links to other ISPs. These ...

 The photonic revolution began with optical fibre, but it will end with optical computers. The German company Q.ANT has designed and is manufacturing itself one of the first all-optical commercial line of computers. Photonic computers are really analogue calculators. The advantage over electron-based digital computers is not the speed of light versus electrons. Their velocities are similar. Instead, the real difference is that digital computers flip zeros and ones using transistors in combination with capacitors. Capacitors must charge and discharge. This takes a lot of time. It also consumes a lot of power all of which ends up as heat. 😃Even a simple addition of two numbers requires approximately 200 transistors. Taking the square root of a number involves 7000 transistors and the work horse Fourier transformation requires roughly 1 million transistors. Note that glasses also passively perform a Fourier transformation. In other words a single optical device in a computer can do a...

There is strong demand for wavelengths connecting Europe's key routes like London/Paris, Amsterdam/London, Amsterdam/Frankfurt, Frankfurt/Paris, Paris/Marseille, Zurich/Frankfurt, Milano/Marseille, Madrid/Paris, Madrid/Lisbon, etc. Much of this involves African ISPs that come to Europe to peer and buy transit as well as Indian and Asian firms.  But Europe is different. A 100G wavelength varies from the mid to upper 800 Euros per month to the mid 1500 Euros depending on term, route, physical diversity, latency, etc. Because rates are low focusing on price is a mistake. Don't be transactional like a certain American President. You will save little because prices are already low, but sacrifice a lot in terms of latency, time waiting for price quotes, delivery, uptime, routing options and commercial flexibility. For example, my favorite provider has fast routes for general bandwidth users that are usually 1 to 4 milliseconds lower latency than the rest of the pack. So you can save ...

James Jun and his partners are classic American telecom entrepreneurs. They have built street vaults in Boston for cross connects. Carriers meet in the street to connect their networks for one time fees and an annual service charge. Their company was an ISP (Towardex) that transformed itself into a local infrastructure provider by building a dark fibre ring including conduits and these cross connect vaults. It is a powerful combination because customers can get dark fibre but also do mass cross connects using fusion splicing for one time fees. For example, carrier X can directly cross connect to carrier Y in the vault robbing the data centers of recurring cross connect revenue. Note the pristine condition of this under-the-street vault for interconnection. Clean, well organized, and no flooding.  The street vault is directly connected to the major carrier conduit systems. Each plastic cover on the wall above is a conduit. Large carriers often require huge number of cross connects. ...

The Africa-1 cable is landing today in Duba, Saudi Arabia, a small port city, where a new CLS awaits it. Right now East African countries are suffering severe subsea cable capacity shortages that have driven 100G prices between Kenya and South Africa into the $40K to $65K per month range. Same for Kenya to Marseille. Only Seacom, 2Africa and Eassy link together the key East African counties. Seacom is a low capacity 2000 era system with chromatic dispersion fibre. Just a couple terabits per second. Eassy has more capacity at 36 Tbps, but both cables are in any case almost completely maxed out. 2Africa has huge capacity with an initial design throughput of 180 Tbps, but it is not connected to Europe via the Red Sea due to the recent Houthi hostilities. The only nearby telecom hub is South Africa. However, much of the East African traffic is ultimately destined for Europe. Hence the delays in lighting the Marseille/Mombasa 2Africa segment which would relieve the network congestion are th...

I bring you good news. The 2Africa cable is landing today in Duba, Saudi Arabia, a small port city. The Marseille/Kenya and Marseille/Mumbai segments of 2Africa has been delayed due to the Red Sea hostilities. This delay combined with limited Seacom and Eassy capacity has caused 100G prices along the East African Coast to skyrocket into the mid 40s to low 60s. Peace has not eased this crunch in part because some providers are only selling IRUs and the others are riding the high prices themselves.  The Marseille/Egypt 2Africa segment is done and activated. But the real question is whether the consortium is prepared to take the risk of extending the subsea cable down to Djibouti right across from Yemen and then from Djibouti down to Somalia and Kenya and up to Oman. The Houthis have said the Red Sea is open for business, but the 2Africa consortium is bound to take a wait and see approach. Finishing Marseille to Kenya would enable the East African Coast to begin sendin...

The beauty of publicly traded telecom infrastructure companies is that they cannot shroud their business in secrecy. Below is a very high level breakdown of Equinix revenues over the last several years. In 2023 the company got $1.9 billion from interconnection, which is its euphemism for cross connects. It comprised 19.4% of 2023 revenues. I must confess I am bit puzzled by how slowly the cross connect revenues are growing because Equinix offers no volume discounts (in Europe even big long haul carriers get only a few Euros off) to anybody. Moreover, Equinix is indispensable in many cities like Zurich, London (Slough, UK), and Amsterdam (AM5 is the best single peering point in the city). A 3Q2024 investor presentation says the company has 478,000 total interconnections. Let's assume each is a cross connect. That implies $3,974 USD per year or $331 per month, which seems too low. I invite readers to comment if they have an idea of what explains the discrepancy between the standard $...

Nordunet's cost estimates are way off base. It is not a 200 million Euro project, but a half billion Euro project. It would require a special cable ship designed for Arctic climates together with two icebreakers to be on the safe side. The proposed paths are as long as many non-Arctic cables whose construction costs were in the $200 million to $300 million range. But those projects did not require specially designed cable ships nor icebreakers for deployment or for the necessary geophysical survey undertaken before construction. The cable would probably be double armoured and the design phase costs alone probably twice the norm.  So it is a given that upfront costs will be extraordinarily high. And here is the dagger in the heart: ice scouring. Floating glaciers scrape the bottom of the sea floor in the Arctic coastal areas. One or two meter burial won't be enough for the Northwest passage route raising the cost. But going deeper for burial may require special equipment or not...