Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Here's a very informative diagram of subsea cable landing infrastructure. Thanks to Nilesh N. The segment from the beach manhole to the cable landing station is called the front haul. From the beach manhole to the cable buried offshore is called the shore end. The ideal way to land a cable is to install a big pipe called a bore using directional horizontal drilling. The subsea cable goes through the bore pipe to a beach manhole where it is spliced to standard terrestrial fibre, usually G.652d or G.657a. Note it is possible to create a fibre ring between the manhole and the CLS for greater resiliency. All it requires is a cable splitter.  Note that diagram places the back up generators in the basement. Not a good idea in a tsunami or hurricane zone subject to flooding. The Japanese nuclear accident happened because a tsunami flooded the reactor's basement where all the backup generators were located. No back up power for cooling led to the meltdown. So the earthquake destroyed...

 The Starlink supporters who discount the emerging competition are quite foolish. The LEO wars are just beginning. The typical Starlink investor fan has a limited understanding of the importance of a strong terrestrial telecom backbone and a huge customer base. Amazon has both. It is the largest cloud provider on the planet and has subsea cable ownership stakes which give it a more resilient and scalable network. Amazon has 310 million residential customers to which it can market satellite services as well as 8 million businesses including a majority of the Fortune 100. Amazon has cash and cash equivalents equal to $58 billion and is net cash flow positive. In contrast, Starlink still depends largely on equity and debt sales to finance its business. Starlink is also probably bleeding cash in many markets. In emerging markets like Hungary it is offering zero install charges on 12 month contracts. In other words, it is losing at least a couple hundred dollars upfront on...

I've talked to a lot of aspiring sub-Saharan African entrepreneurs. I always whisper the same thing in their ears: prefabricated modular data centers!!! Why? Because most of Africa doesn't have carrier neutral telecom hotels or data centers. For example, Sierra Leone's government keeps its 'sovereign data' at Dallas Equinix of all places. There is no genuine colo provider in the poor African state. Now one of the greatest advantages in business is to be first. Large swathes of Africa have no multi-tenant buildings for storing data or as interconnection points for the mobile providers, carriers and ISPs. So If you can build a small data center in a region that has none, your project is likely to attract sufficient customers to be successful. The key point is that you need to create a professional data center that is quite small because the initial market is limited, but can be scaled as the market grows. Most areas can only initially support one small data center. He...

Yann LeCun is winner of the Turing prize and META's chief AI researcher. He puts it most eloquently. Not sure the Facebook subsea cable planning group got the message.

The Finnish prosecutor is charging the captain with intentionally damaging five Baltic Sea cables despite having no evidence that it was intentional. The prosecutor admitted in the filing that it has no evidence of Russian or Chinese involvement. His office has no evidence of payment or communication with either state or any documentation of a plan to intentionally drag the anchor. A more credible charge in the circumstances would have been criminal negligence. The legal defense has an excellent argument against the charge of criminal mischief, namely anchor dragging happens all the time without the crew's knowledge. There's a good chance that the prosecution loses the case due its filing a very difficult to prove allegation. Is the prosecutor a blockhead? For more details, click on https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/nv/insights/finland-charges-russian-linked-ship-officers-over-baltic-sea-cable-sabotage. 

Underappreciated Atlantic Cable Systems: Amitié & TGN Atlantic South Tran-Atlantic Internet traffic tends to flow from Secaucus Equinix and Ashburn Equinix to Slough Equinix and Paris and vice versa. Madrid and Portugal are becoming important telecom hubs as well. The most logical choices for Ashburn Equinix to Continental Europe waves are the Marea and Dunant cables. These SDM systems provide welcomed physical diversity by bypassing the UK. But there is also huge traffic between Secaucus and Slough Equinix. If you are a Speed Freak high frequency trader, then EXA's Express is probably the way to go. But if you need something economical with reasonable diversity to most other subsea cables and rock solid up time, then you must consider TATA's four fibre pair Atlantic South cable that lands in New Jersey and Highbridge, UK. Pricing is competitive and its landing is diverse to the poplar Bude, UK landing where nine cables land. From what I can tell TGN back hau...

1. The Gate to Hell in Dante's Inferno has an inscription stating "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here". I think he was actually referring to the Senegal telecommunications market. My conversations with African carriers and Tier 2 ISPs suggest that entering the market is extremely difficult. Much more than Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria or South Africa. Only the Sonatel/Orange joint venture (cartel?) has managed to secure a gateway license for 2Africa capacity. This is the consequence of the pernicious and incestuous relationship between Senegal's government and the de facto Sonatel monopoly.  Developing a country is best accomplished via competition with low barriers to entry, not government sanctioned monopolies with a good dose of under-the-table brown bags stuffed full of Euros and US dollars.  The Senegal government is spending a huge amount on the Numerique data center and other digital projects, but they will not live up to their promise unless transport prices mat...

AAE1; $21.5K MRC; Two Year Term. Peace; $17.5K MRC; One Year Term. A points: MRS2. Z points: SG1/SG3. Customer responsible for cross connects.

Google's Topaz cable offers exceptional physical diversity due to its unique Vancouver, BC and Japanese landings. It is also one of the shortest paths from the Tokyo financial exchanges to Seattle, Chicago, and the CME data centre. A point: CC1, TY4. Z points: Cologix VAN4, Vancouver. Also Equinix at 350 East Cermak, Chicago, and Digital Realty, Westin Building, Seatle. Service: Standard Layer 1 10G waves. OTN. Terms: 1, 2 & 3 Years.

In the late 90s Tyco Electronics (TE) purchased AT&T's subsea cable laying division. Stock prices of new fibre optic networks were soaring and priced at multiples similar to American Tech Giants today. So TE built a global subsea network, Tyco Global Network (TGN), to sell wholesale capacity. By the time it was completed in 2003, bandwidth pricing had collapsed. It was clear that the billions spent on TGN would never be recouped. By 2005, TATA, then known as VSNL, scooped it up for $130 million in one of the great contrarian investments in the telecom industry (Hibernia Atlantic's purchase in 2001 is another example). TATA got a lot. It included two Atlantic cables structured as a ring, dual cables linking India to Marseille and to Singapore plus a number of Pacific cables. TGN Pacific was one of those distressed assets. TGN Pacific was designed like most cables of that era to be self healing. Today most customers provide their own route protection via routers or switches....

Great Marseille/Singapore 100G AAE1 Pricing: $21.5K MRC A point: MRS2. Z point: SG3. Term: 1 Year. Service: Layer 1 100G Wave. NRC: $0. Estimated Latency: 135 ms RTD. Customer responsible for cross connects. Delivery: Four weeks from customer signature.

A point: Most Tokyo Equinix sites. Also CC1 & Osaka Equinix. Z point: San Jose Equinix, LA Coresite 2. Service: 10G Wave. Layer 1. Term: 2 years. MRC: $5250. NRC: $2500. Customer responsible for cross connects. Cable: Juno. Remarks: Diverse back haul to both LA & San Jose. A point: TY5. Z point: Secaucus Equinix. Service: 10G wave. Layer 1. Term: 3 Years Latency: 163 ms RTD. MRC: $8500. Customer responsible for cross connects. Cable: No outages in the last two years. Note: Ideal for financial trading.

Singtel is leading a consortium of Asian carriers and American tech giants that will finance a new intra-asian cable connecting Japan, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea. Details are sparse. Press releases say it will be a high fibre count network. My guess is at least 12 pairs and as much as 24. Two core fibre is also a possibility given NEC's participation. What is striking is that SJC2 and ADC just went in service with Apricot also expected to be RFS this year, yet here is another cable with a similar Southeast Asian footprint under development. This suggests to me that traffic is growing faster than anticipated with the carriers under pressure to catch up to the rapidly growing market. The other notable feature is the absence of any landings in Hong Kong or mainland China. Since China has emerged as the regional bully, the cable's name is probably not a coincidence. Consortium members include Singtel, Amazon, Micro...

100G Equiano Waves: Most Lagos DCs/European Cities: $17K MRC. A Points: Equinix, Medallion LOS1/2, Medallion LKK2, and Rack Centre. Z points: Key Marseille, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London DCs. Service: 100G Wavelength. Term: 3 Years. MRC: $17K. Lagos Metro Route Protection Included. Promotion Ends September 15th.

The AFR-IX cable project has selected Nokia as their primary coherent optics vendor. Medusa will deploy the Nokia 1830 platform that supports coherent optics. Nokia's Infinera acquisition provides the ICE7 coherent optics. This equipment announcement illustrates how slowly the interesting Medusa project is moving. This project was announced in 2020. While it is smart to delay terminal gear purchases towards the end of the project, subsea cable projects have not historically taken upwards of six or seven years to finish. I can only speculate on the cause of these delays. The system has many landings in dysfunctional North African countries where governments are authoritarian, corrupt, incompetent or compromised by their ownership or control of PTTs. Cable ships are scarce. So booking them for the deployment may have been a big obstacle. I am disappointed that Medusa made the 'safe choice'. Big projects with lots of cash usually end up picking either Ciena or Infinera for the...