Successor To AAE1 Announced: AAE2

Rumors have been floating around for several months about a successor project to AAE1 known as AAE2. Like AAE1, the key goal is to connect Hong Kong and Singapore to India, the Middle East, and Europe. The core consortium includes PCCW, Telecom Egypt, Omantel, and Sparkle. Just like other recent projects such as SMW6, AAE2 will avoid the Red Sea. Instead, the cable will land in Oman, then traverse Saudi Arabia and Egypt to reach the Red Sea. I applaud the cable's designers for ditching the Red Sea. It was long overdue. However, a more logical approach is to avoid Egypt all together. The Saudi Arabian desert will be expensive. The consortium has increased both capex and opex further by using Egypt for transit. Egypt treats subsea cables the way a toll road treats cars. It extracts a monopoly fee from them. It makes no sense given that Israel has a competitive telecom market versus Egypt's pseudo competitive market. 

Another interesting design feature is that Italy was mentioned as the European landing spot, but there was no mention of Marseille. This is not surprising. Marseille landings are good in terms of latency for France, the Iberian Peninsula, UK, and Benelux. But an Italian landing is better for Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Just as important, too many transcontinental cables call Marseille home. It has become a single point of failure. 

So where will the cable land in Italy? The path of least resistance would be Genoa where back haul fibre is available and other important subsea cables already land. Retelit's Bari CLS is probably out of the question because AAE1 uses it. Both AAE1 and AAE2 using the samel CLS creates a single point of failure. If the consortium wants to prove that they are free thinkers, I recommend Trieste. It meets the diversity requirement, but probably has a lower Singapore/Frankfurt latency than either Marseille, Bari or Genoa. But subsea cable consortiums are not free thinkers, hence Genoa is the most likely landing candidate. Quadrivium Digital has a 12 megawatt data center there that offers an alternative to the Equinix Genoa facility. Reliable sources suggest that a Sparkle data center will serve as the CLS. 

One AAE1 design flaw was the five fibre pair count cable. I expect AAE2 to be at least 8 and possibly 12 pairs. Spectral efficiency favors a 400G backbone. It is almost a certainty that the route will be designed to achieve a record low latency for the important Frankfurt/Singapore financial route.