Firmina: The Other Atlantic Leviathan

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. The OTTs design and finance their cables and when they are close to RFS, sell some capacity to carriers to recoup capex costs. Hence the carriers have become marginalized in the New World of Digital Titan dominance because the main potential source of demand supply it themselves. The old consortium model of large carriers has disappeared on both the Atlantic and South American routes. Even private carriers cables are struggling with Aqua Comms sold off for a pittance ($42 million) to EXA. 

Telxius has acquired a Firmina fibre pair as part of a complex deal that involves providing landing rights, CLS, and fibre back haul in Brazil. Cirion Technologies, which owns the former Lumen South American assets, has also purchased a pair. Firmina is substantially complete, but no RFS announcement so far. 

Firmina continues the Tech Company tradition of developing new landing spots to improve network physical diversity. It lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina like Anjana as opposed to the numerous New York and Virginia Beach landings. From there traffic will head North to Ashburn Equinix or South to the Atlanta telecom hub serving the Southeastern US. Firmina has branching units to Uruguay, an underserved country, as well as Brazil with the main trunk coming ashore at Las Toninas, Argentina. Myrtle Beach allows Google to take South American traffic going to Europe and place it on the Anjana cable. 

The American Digital Giants are shaking up the stodgy world of subsea cables. Firmina is the first cable that can be completely powered from one of the two main trunk end points if there is a catastrophic power failure at the other end. Firmina is also an open cable. So any party that buys a fibre pair uses their own DWDM gear to light it. The only common equipment are the undersea amplifiers and the power feeds. So while Google may use vendor X to light its own pairs, any carrier customer selects their own.