Amazon's First Solo Undersea Project: The Atlantic Fastnet Cable

Fastnet is a 16 fibre pair submarine network landing in Maryland and in Southern Ireland near Castlefreke. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the first cable in perhaps ten years to land in Ireland and the first landing ever in Maryland. The Irish landing makes perfect sense; Amazon has roughly 350,000 m2 of data center space in the country. It hosts an important cloud region (eu-west-1) there in large part due to a very low corporate tax rate. In addition, it just received clearance to build three data centers near Dublin totaling usable space of 42,585 m2.

The choice of Maryland again shows that the hyperscalers value resiliency versus latency more than do the wholesale carriers and telecom incumbents. The latter focus on low latency routes for both Internet backbone and financial trading firms. The main US East Coast telecom hubs are Secaucus Equinix and Ashburn Equinix. If latency was Amazon's top priority, Maryland would not have been the landing point. The same point holds for the Southern Ireland coastal drop off point. A low latency path would have been a West Coast landing followed by a straight shot to Dublin where most of the country's telecom infrastructure lies. However, hyperscalers by their actions show they consider higher latency up to a point to be an acceptable tradeoff for better resiliency. RFS is 2028.

Map of Fibre Optic Fastnet Subsea Cable

Photo of Southern Ireland's Coast Where Fastnet Cable Will Land



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