Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

A couple years ago BTG Pactual Infrastructure Fund II purchased the subsea operator, GlobeNet, as well as a South American fibre optics backbone company, OI, and combined those assets with a couple of data centers. Globenet's main asset, its cable linking New Jersey to Sao Paulo, is near end of life. But its cable landing stations face no such expiration date. Moreover, the Fortaleza CLS is a well known peering point with a lot of customers. BTG put all the telecom assets in a telecom infrastructure subsidiary known as V.TAL. At PTC in Hawaii V.TAL announced its plan for a 16 fibre pair, 320 Tbps subsea cable that will link the Sao Paulo Equinix data centers to Secaucus Equinix and probably also the NASDAQ and NYSE data centers in Carteret and Mahwah, New Jersey. The Globenet assets will accelerate the project because Synapse will use its cable landing stations in Tuckerton and Fortaleza as well as some of the existing US back haul fibre. The OI backbone, purchased f...

The private equity firm Cerberus has taken a majority equity stake in Datawave Networks, a Cyprus-based subsea cable developer. Datawave's key project is to deploy a linear 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable linking UAE, Oman, Mumbai, Chennai, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Datawave began this project in 2019 when the company was incorporated. But due to the increasing dominance of American Tech Giants, investors have been reluctant to fund private wholesale network operators. It is simply seen as too risky given lack of hyperscaler demand for leased subsea network capacity. Due to the Cerberus acquisition, SING is now fully funded with Subcom expected to complete the project in 2030. I believe part of what drove Cerberus' interest in this project was the Red Sea bottleneck. While building Marseille to Singapore would be viewed as too risky given the required capital, linking the new subsea cable hub of Oman to Singapore seems like a...

Blue Origin is a Jeff Bezos' startup providing space services to NASA and other clients. Those services include cargo delivery, rocket engines, lunar landing vehicles, and under development, a commercial space station. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket carries as much cargo as SpaceX' Starship and successfully launched a NASA probe in late 2025. The first stage is reusable.  New Glenn's success has encouraged Blue Origin to develop new satellite constellations. The company announced yesterday a hybrid network of 5,280 LEO and 128 MEO satellites called Terawave that will use dual free space lasers and radio frequencies to communicate with the Earth. Radio frequency will provide a minimum committed bit rate of 144 Gibabits per second, many magnitudes greater than what Starlink offers, with free space lasers boosting the throughput by 6 terabits in ideal weather conditions. Dual connectivity is not a new idea. Low latency financial trading platforms have been using microwave ...

EUNetworks offers standard VLAN services for connectivity to public clouds and data centers and also standalone dedicated Ethernet private line. The Ethernet private line is a dedicated service and port product. It is fully protocol transparent. All Ethernet lines are MPLS protected by default. While the primary path is static, the protect path is dynamic. Circuit restoration varies from 50 milliseconds to to a few hundred milliseconds depending on routing. Bandwidth is highly granular. It ranges from 10 megabits to 100 gigabits. Ethernet private line is ideal for companies and governments because the MPLS protection core includes so many routing paths that downtime is extremely limited. EUNetworks has thousands of Ethernet-enabled Layer 2 sites in Western Europe. Approximately a 100 sites allow for provisioning in a few minutes. APIs are available for ordering and monitoring service. Routing options include point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and multipoint to multipo...

The cable ship has repaired one fault, but discovered at least one other fault in shallow water. Repair of the second fault begins soon.

Amazon's North American fibre optic network below. Its global network consists of nine million kilometers of owned fibre pairs. Amazon spent the last year experimenting with hollow core fibre and is now ready to join Microsoft in long haul deployments. See their blog for more setails:  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-insights/building-resilience-inside-awss-nine-million-kilometers-of-fiber-optic-cabling/. Microsoft has deployed hollow core fibre in the long haul to connect three AI data centres. It owns the leading hollow core manufacturer and research company, Lumenisity.  New hollow core designs unveiled in a recent Nature Photonics paper have solved the main obstacle to long haul deployment, namely high attenuation. High attenuation simply means light pulses fade rapidly and hence require frequent amplification. In contrast, Luminisity's new hollow core design unveiled in the Nature publication has 50% less attenuation than standard fibre. This means it can be incorpor...

Estonia is a small Baltic nation with 1.4 million inhabitants. It has eight subsea fibre optic cables plus several power interconnectors. It is a large number given its land mass and population. Over the last several years Baltic Sea outages have been frequent with many in the Nordics pointing their finger at Russia. Many of these outages have involved cables landing in Estonia. However, the Baltic Sea is extremely shallow. Its average depth is 52 to 55 meters. So cables in these waters are extremely vulnerable to fishing vessels and cargo ships dragging anchors. If they are not buried deeply in protected sea lanes, damage is inevitable. The other factor is the Russia shadow fleet. Europe is weaning itself off Russian gas imports with the figure falling from 8 billion cubic meters per month in early 2022 to 2 billion cubic meters today. When the war began, sanctions forced European headquartered global shipping lines to either stop serving Russia or place restrictions on acc...

*** There are persistent rumors that the four cables down in the Red Sea will be repaired this month: Falcon, EIG, IMEWE, and SMW4. This rumor puzzles me because last autumn an Israeli air strike killed the Houthi Prime Minister. Subsequently, the ongoing discussions between the Houthi government, the Omani government, and Omantel concerning a long term agreement to exempt cable repair ships from missile targeting collapsed. I am not sure what is happening. Yemen as a country has further disintegrated with UAE-backed separatists in the Hadramout and Al Mahra provinces seeking to establish a state. Yemen is now remarkably fragmented as the maps shows. *** Medusa is working hard on extending their network to the West African coast. The plan as reported by Winston Qiu is to extend the Medusa Mediterranean network to Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola, and South Africa. It is supposedly a 24 fibre pair system. This would put it at the upper end of spatial d...

The Brits are credited with the first operational telegraph network in 1836. By 1855 both the US and the UK had country-wide telegraph systems. In 1851 the first successful English channel telegraph cable went live. In 1866 came the Atlantic's turn.  Telegraph quickly became essential to managing the large empires that European countries and the US were developing. It made possible quick coordination and response to geopolitical events as well as encouraging commerce and financial flows. After the Atlantic and English Channel connectivity was established, the Brits deployed a cable through the Gibraltar strait that traversed the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal, went down the Red Sea and all the way to Mumbai (known then as Bombay). The Brits extended this network all the way to Shanghai and Singapore. The British government realized that the only way to effectively maintain an far flung empire was to developed a high capacity, resilient telegraph network. Key regions included ...

EXA now owns the Aqua Comms assets. These include fibre pairs on AEC-1, AEC-2, and Amitié. EXA also acquired two Irish Sea cables as part of the purchase. EXA managment emphasizes customer choice in their justification of the deal, but I think what makes it a good deal for EXA is the price. It picked up lots of fibre pairs for a total price of around $40 million. Now subsea fibre IRU purchases often range from $30 million to $60 million per pair on life of system term deals. So this is a great distressed purchase. In the same ballpark as Columbia Venture's purchase of the 360 Networks for $25 million, which was rebranded as Hibernia Atlantic. I think the main question I would pose to EXA's operational staff is whether they can generate cost savings. Operational synergies are important to judging the success of an acquisition. This is where companies often fail in their consolidation efforts. GTT went bankrupt in 2021 after rapidly buying lots of network assets i...

The author argues that the stodgy business community is underestimating Amazon's threat to Starlink. Amazon is developing a wholesale model for LEO capacity that dovetails perfectly with its terrestrial network superiority over Starlink. At this point Starlink is pretty much everyone's enemy: "While Starlink also offers business tiers, its ambition to become a global consumer telco makes it a threat to carriers. For a company like Verizon or AT&T, Starlink is a frenemy: a partner today, a predator tomorrow." In contrast, Amazon wants to be everyone's friend. Amazon's dedicated 1 gigabit Ultra terminal will be sold to carriers that will deliver Internet to the premise via 5G connections. In rural Michigan I encountered households whose home routers were linked to the Internet via 5G mobile frequencies. Mobile carriers have found 5G demand to be very weak. Hence their spectrum is underutilized. Here's the solution. Amazon realizes that succ...

TAT-1 was the first Trans-Atlantic cable intended to carry voice traffic. Up to that point the only telephony across the ocean was short wave radio. These first generation vacuum tubes regenerated the electrical signals used for communication. These vacuum tubes could only regenerate in one direction. Hence TAT-1 was a two cable system. The vacuum tubes were amazingly reliable with none of the 51 repeaters on each of the two cables comprising TAT-1 failing during its long operational life span. The cable introduced two other innovations, namely polyethylene to protect the cable and a coaxial cable design. Polyethylene replaced gutta-perch, a tree rubber product.  

Let's be clear. LEO satellite service is an unproven business model. Obviously, if prices are high enough or the service is a monopoly, it will work. But no complete financial picture is public at this point. This is why the planned 2026 IPO is so interesting. The prospectus will reveal enough to make an informed judgment. But despite stubborn optimism to the contrary, there is no strong evidence that LEO Internet is highly profitable. I doubt even Starlink investors have the company's complete financial details except for a few high profile venture capitalists. Starlink does release an annual report. It is best characterized as a slick marketing pitch designed to give the impression that Starlink is an unstoppable juggernaut that reflects historical inevitability. All Bow to Caesar. What are the missing details? 1. Depreciation. 2. Customer acquisition costs. 3. Operating expenses. 4. Capital replacement costs. Depreciation is important because LEOs are like...

EXA now owns the Aqua Comm assets. These include fibre pairs on AEC-1, AEC-2, and Amitié. EXA also acquired two Irish Sea cables as part of the purchase. EXA managment emphasizes customer choice in their justification of the deal, but I think what makes it a good deal for EXA is price. It picked up lots of fibre pairs for a total price of around $40 million. Now subsea fibre IRU purchases often range from $30 million to $60 million per pair on life of system term deals. So this is a great distressed purchase. In the same ballpark as Columbia Venture's purchase of the 360 Networks for $25 million, which was rebranded as Hibernia Atlantic. I think the main question I would have for EXA's operational staff is whether they can generate cost savings. Operational synergies are important to judging the success of an acquisition. This is where companies often fail in their consolidation efforts. GTT went bankrupt in 2021 after rapidly buying lots of network assets including Interoute, ...