Underappreciated Atlantic Cable Systems: Amitié & TGN Atlantic South

Atlantic Internet traffic tends to flow from Secaucus Equinix and Ashburn Equinix to Slough Equinix and Paris. Madrid and Portugal are becoming important as well. The most logical choices for Ashburn Equinix to Continental Europe waves are the Marea and Dunant Cables. These high capacity SDM systems provide welcomed physical diversity by bypassing the UK.

But there is also strong demand 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 subsea cables and rock solid up time, then you must consider TATA's four fibre pair South Atlantic cable that lands in New Jersey and High Bridge. Pricing is competitive, but it is also diverse to the congested Bude, UK landing that at least nine cables call home. From what I can tell TGN back haul to Slough should have little overlap with the Bude cables, which generally traverse Bristol, Oxford, and then hit Slough, UK.

Due to an NDA, I hesitate to provide exact details, but I can say that the TGN South Atlantic's wet segment has been continuously up for at least last 4 years. It is an astonishingly good network performance. Tyco Electronics acquired AT&T's legendary submarine cable division in 1998. TE built TGN Atlantic as part of a platinum plated global network that it intended to keep as a TE subsidiary, but which TATA picked up in 2005 for pennies. TE built cables to very high standards including unique cable landings, dedicated cable landing stations, and even bore pipes from the beach manhole to the open sea through which the fibre was threaded. I believe it was the perfectionism of the submarine construction group that explains the outstanding up time. Note that cable longevity is inversely proportional to the number of faults requiring splicing. The fewer the repair splices, the longer the cable will last as optical loss accumulates more slowly. It reminds me of my real estate business where expensive high quality renovations have proven cheap long term due to the work's longevity. 

Most Tier 2 ISPs still do not diversify enough on the Atlantic. Landings are still concentrated at Virginia Beach and in the NYC metro area. A relatively new cable that provides some physical diversity relief is Orange's Amitié. It lands in Lynn, Massachusetts, a suburb just above city of Boston. It uses the original Hibernia Atlantic cable landing station, which I visited in 2006, now part of EXA Infrastructure. Amitié also lands at Bude where it is housed in one of the Vodafone cable landing stations. The cable's strength is that it shortens latency for traffic destined and originating from the US Northeast and also Canada. It is also diverse to the NYC area subsea cables used to bring traffic to Secaucus Equinix. Amitié and TGN South Atlantic are good complements for UK destined traffic.