APX-EAST Cable

Bevan Slattery likes to build things. His latest project, scheduled for a 2028 RFS, is the16 fibre pair APX-EAST cable linking Australia to the US. Bevan is Subco's CEO, one of the few successful private cable sea builders and operators. Previous projects include the OMAN to Australia system. The US Pentagon was the anchor tenant on that cable. Subco is a consortium member of the relatively low capacity, but important Indigo West cable linking Singapore to Perth and Sydney. 

APX-EAST is designed to be fully powered by either end point. This is a resilience feature that should appeal to hyperscalers looking to take capacity on the system. I believe Google's Firmina also can be fully powered from either end point as well. Might not be a coincidence. 

But the most striking feature is the lack of optical regeneration. Let's be clear. This cable is repeatered. It will use optical amplifiers like all other repeatered systems. Optical regeneration in this context means landing the cable at an intermediate point like an island and running the signal through the DWDM kit to cleanse the errors. Optical amplifers create errors, which accumulate as the signal traverses the entire cable. Subco is apparently using some new technology that obviates this dirty signal problem. Either it is a new optical amplifier less prone to creating errors or SLTEs that can do better forward error correction. I suspect the latter. Eliminating optical regeneration reduces equipment costs, permitting, and operating expenses. Subco can simply drop branching units in the water off Fiji and Hawaii where its most likely customer, Google, can pick them up and attach them to Google's cable landing stations (Google's Pacific Initiative involves building almost ten new cables and they need terrestrial homes 🙂). 

APX-EAST is designed to provide physical landing diversity. It is the first cable to land North of Sydney's existing cable protection zone. I speculate that the San Diego landing will be at Google's Carlsbad CLS. It is a good guess because Carslbad is diverse to the main landing California landing points. The Carlsbad CLS allows four subsea cables to be threaded through a bore pipe connecting the beach manhole. This bore pipe extends 3000 meters offshore. The easiest way to get this Subco cable ashore would be as a Google tenant. 

The only risk to the project is the purported reliance on AI to generate demand. However, this may just be opportunistic marketing. Google may feel compelled to incorporate large language models into its search engine and cloud services (I use the latter myself), but there is little evidence of a big uptick in AI revenue or the acid test of technological progress, namely faster economic growth (economic growth was robust during the1880-1920 transition to combustion engines for machinery and transportation and the development of power grids). So AI might just be a marketing slogan. 

Map of Subco's Fibre Optic APX-EAST Cable



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