Goggle's New TransAtlantic SOL Cable: The March South

Google's SOL cable is the first Trans-Atlantic network to connect Florida to Europe with a landing at the Telxius Santander CLS on the Northern Spanish coast. The other cable, Nuvem, announced some time ago, will link the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina CLS owned and operated by DC BLOX to a landing near Lisbon. Details are sparse regarding SOL, but it will probably be similar in performance and design to the 16 fibre pair Nuvem cable that clocks 384 Tbps. The Florida landing is in the Palm Coast area between Jacksonville and Orlando.

An interesting feature is that both cables do island hopping. Both cables land in Bermuda and Azores (where a US Air Force base is located). Island hopping serves three goals. The first is power to offset voltage drop. Intermediate power feeding en route improves throughput. The more often a cable can feed, the higher the bandwidth. The other factor is optical amplifier noise. Amplification introduces noise which accumulates from amplifier to amplifier. By bringing the signal ashore to a CLS or data center it can be regenerated using electronics that filter out the noise using forward error correction and other digital processing techniques. The third goal is resiliency. If a segment of either SOL or Nuvem goes down, traffic can be rerouted via the islands to the other cable. If all segments of either SOL or Nuvem goes dark, Google has fibre connecting the landing stations on each side of the Atlantic.

Google is a public company eager to secure public good will. Bermuda gets a massive Internet infrastructure upgrade. Azores offers similar good will benefits. And of course, the US military will probably be interested in a fibre pair for its NATO mission.

The joint design is reminiscent of the old dual cable layouts like Hibernia North and South or the Flag Atlantic cables. Two cables would be deployed to serve the same end points or geographic regions. They would be physically diverse forming a classic ring architecture. Usually they would have a terrestrial connection so that wavelengths could be manually rerouted to the other cable in case of an outage.

I have noted in my previous posts that the American Tech Giants are moving their landings further South down the US East Coast to achieve greater resiliency. Around the year 2000 most cables landed in New York or New Jersey. Then Google and Microsoft landed Dunant and Marea at Virginia Beach. Subsequently, Anjana, Firmina, and Nuvem are landing in South Carolina. Now we are seeing the inevitable conclusion with SOL landing on the West Florida Coast. The March South reduces the average latency of Atlantic traffic by distributing traffic.

It would be very surprising if Telxius did not take capacity on SOL due to its focus on South and Latin America. Cable manufacturing is in the States so this is likely to be a Subcom project. Nuvem means cloud and Sol means sun.

Map Of The New Fibre Optic Subsea SOL Cable


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breaking Story: Facebook Building Subsea Cable That Will Encompass The World

Image
Several sources have whispered in my ear that META is planning a new 16 fibre pair cable that will encompass the world going from the US East Coast to the US West Coast via the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The most ambitious subsea project ever undertaken. I do not know the exact routing. I know that the cable will launch from the American East Coast and will go down the West African Coast to South Africa and then head straight to Mumbai. It is not clear if Europe will be online or not. From Mumbai it will head straight to Australia and then up to the US West Coast. I speculate that there may be branching units to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But the basic routing is US/South Africa/India/Australia/US. What is not clear is if there will be branching units to add more countries to the cable.  This semi-secret cable reflects META's desire for network resiliency given the four month Red Sea down time that AAE-1 and other subsea cables suffered during the first half ...
Read more

Facebook's Semi-Secret W Cable

Image
 A few days ago I wrote that Facebook was planning a new subsea cable directly linking the US East Coast to South Africa, then up to India, onward to Australia, and finally to the US West Coast. Clearly resiliency is a big theme. It avoids Lisbon, Marseille, Egypt, the Red Sea, and Singapore. All choke points due to their telecom hub status. Note that the map below shows lots of branching units, but I don't have insider confirmation although they make perfect sense. The cable is 16 fibre pairs.  This cable may be heavily influenced by AI considerations. AI data centres require lots of space and power. The US, South Africa, India, and Australia are good candidates for AI data centres in terms of space. All of them except for South Africa have modern power grids. But South Africa is still the best place on the continent for large scale AI facilities. An AI theme makes particular sense given the cable's high latency. An AI data centre does not directly serve custo...
Read more

How To Calculate An IRU Price For a 100G Wavelength

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...
Read more