Google's Bosun Cable Update

Google's Bosun cable will connect Christmas Island, located in the East Indian Ocean, to Darwin, Australia, site of a large military base with rotating contingents of Japanese and American soldiers. The project was announced near the end of 2024. At the time it struck me as a bit strange.

Google's new cables across the Pacific will do a lot of island hopping. This allows the power to be boosted, the islands can serve as traffic switching centers if they are hosting multiple cables, and complete OEO regeneration can be done. Voltage drops as electricity flows through the copper or aluminum current conductor. So the advantage of powering a cable at intermediate points is clear. It enables higher end-to-end transmission throughput. A key aspect of Google's Pacific projects is better resiliency. The easiest way to do that is a put a small prefabricated modular CLS on an island and land multiple cables there. There Layer 3 switching can divert traffic in case a cable segment goes dark. Finally, light flowing through many consecutive subsea optical repeaters accumulates errors. Optical amplifiers do not correct errors and they will perpetuate any errors received. Hence passing the signal through a forward error correction device at an island CLS can clean it up.

But none of these reasons seem to explain landing a major cable at Christmas Island, which is a national wildlife park known for its annual migration of red crabs. But Christmas island is strategically located for military surveillance as well operations against potential foes like mainland China. Geography places strict limits on how Chinese submarines can reach the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Malacca is one narrow seaway. The other is to slither through the Sunda Strait separating the islands of Java and Sumatra. Christmas Island is nearby.

According to Reuters (https://lnkd.in/drqy9-NN), Google is building a six megawatt "AI data centre". Independent sources have confirmed Google is looking for six megawatts of power provided via diesel and renewables. The most plausible explanation is that this small data centre will be used by the Australians and Americans to process the information picked up in the area by drones, ships, and aircraft.

It is worth noting that Christmas Island may have another purpose. Google plans to deploy a cable called Umoja directly linking South Africa to Australia. The Indian ocean is not rich in islands. So Google may be forced to use Christmas Island to boost Umoja's power and regenerate its signals across such a vast distance (12,000 kilometers).

As always I compliment Google on its religiously vague and uninformative maps. 😄

Map of Planned Google Cables Including Bosun



Map of Australia, Indian Ocean, and Christmas Island


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Here We Go Again: Several Major Cables Down Off Yemen

Image
Three industry insiders have confirmed the 'epicenter' of the outages is in Yemen coastal waters at a depth of only one 100 meters. This strongly suggests fishing or more likely an anchor is responsible. Multiple sources have told me that neither Egyptian or Saudi Internet services has been degraded, but the Persian Gulf has been hit hard as well as Pakistan. This is consistent with the epicenter being off Yemen. It is also consistent with the cables reported down below. Four Cables Definitely Down: 1. EIG. 2. SWM4. 3. IMEWE. 4. Falcon Lower left map is SMW4. Center is EIG. Far right is IMEWE. Total capacity of these four cables is approximately 44 Tbps. Pakistan is heavily dependent on SWM4, EIG, and IMEWE. Scattered reports initially suggest AAE1 may also be down. But it is not.
Read more

Update on META's Waterworth Project

Image
META has started selecting landing sites. As the map below shows, the subsea cable's routing is unique, a record breaking 50,000 kilometers in length, and it will form a ring around the world. A ring allows Facebook to reroute traffic in the opposite direction if there is a fault. Waterworth is a 24 fibre pair system. That puts at the top of the fiber pair count for spatial division multiplexing systems. So figure a design transmission rate of a half petabit per second.  Although crazy news outlets have reported it will cost $10 billion, that figure is absurd. The project can easily be done for $2 billion or less even with extensive terrestrial trenching to create new and unique fibre routes. Will the project use new technologies like multicore fibre or multiband spectrum? Doubtful. The price tag dictates the META subsea cable design team will use standard proven technology. No one wants to tell their boss they just wasted $1.5 billion dollars. It is not good for your career. 😃 Wa...
Read more

The Short Life Expectancy of Starlink's LEO Satellites

Image
According to FCC filings Starlink shut down almost 500 Starlink satellites during the first half of 2025. The company had them reenter the atmosphere where they burned up. What is striking is that these satellites were all less than 5 years old. The general consensus is that LEOs have a life expectancy ranging from 5 to 8 years. Shorter than expected life spans for the satellites will hit Starlink's income statement hard by increasing network depreciation and replacement needs. However, Starlink has managed to lower its LEO's manufacturing costs down to $500K versus initial figures around $1 million. So these production economies of scale might offset some of the higher than expected depreciation. However, there are also rocket launch costs as well. It costs Starlink about $3 million to put a satellite into orbit. The Falcon 9 costs $67 million per flight and delivers 23 LEOs into low Earth orbit. As a private company Starlink financials are a bit of mystery. The company press ...
Read more