Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Facebook's subsea cable subsidary, Edge Cable Holdings, has petitioned the FCC to land a new cable at the NJIX data center in Wall Township, New Jersey. The cable lands in Europe at an Arelion owned facility in Blaabjerg, Denmark. META uses both NJIX and the Arelion facility for the power feed equipment, but is installing the submarine line termination equipment, which includes the lasers and electronics at a Piscataway carrier neutral data center and its Danish counterpart, an unnamed Esbjerg site. There are two huge data centers in Esbjerg. Facebook currently owns two fiber pairs on the consortium AEC-2 subset network linking the US and Denmark. AEC-2 has exactly the same end points as Aurora. Hyperscaler traffic has grown so rapidly that consortium membership in many cases simply makes no economic sense. Most hyperscalers need all the capacity that a cable provides and hence sole ownership as emerged as the most economic business model. We know very little about A...

Communications Authority of Nigeria reports more than 5,000 fiber cuts in the first six months of 2026. If you are operating a Lagos network and need reliable 100G waves to connect your POPs, I have the solution. My provider offers route protected 100Gs as the default service and most them have few outages each year due to a unique backbone almost completely immune to construction digging cuts. The MRC for a route protected 100G connecting OADC, MDXI or Server House is $5,750 per month.

Google is a good example. The Umoja cable directly links South Africa to Australia. Humboldt links Chile to Australia. There is also a new planned cable directly linking the Indian East Coast to South Africa. No carrier consortium would ever entertain lighting such routes.  The answer is simple. As Google revenues become bigger and bigger, the opportunity cost per millisecond of any network disruption rises. More money is lost per unit of time and hence it makes sense to plough more resources into resiliency. As economists say, marginal benefit exceeds marginal cost. Google isn't building South Africa to India because there is a flood of traffic between the two countries. A key reason to do is greater routing options and hence a more stable network. The other part of the answer is Google's cloud aspirations. Its current global market share is 15% versus Microsoft at 20% and Amazon's 28%. In other words, it is playing catch up. Now Amazon has most of the Fortune...

An optical amplifier being lowered in the sea during a cable deployment. They are designed to work at depths as great as 10,000 meters where pressure equals a thousand and one earth atmospheres. Their design lifespan is 25 years and they rarely fail. Almost all subsea cable damage involves the fibre cable itself as opposed to the amplifiers. Besides immense pressure, the amplifiers must resist sea salt corrosion. To do so their hulls are generally comprised of titanium or high strength beryllium copper alloys. Titanium offers an exceptionally high strength to weight ratio as well as unmatched corrosion resistance at ocean depth pressure. Beryrillium copper dissipates heat extremely well. This is essential as the amplifiers contain many lasers and they generate significant heat.

On the left is a deep sea fibre optic cable. It consists of fibre pairs, ranging from two to 24, placed in a hermetically sealed stainless steel chamber surrounded by closely packed steel wires, then a copper power conductor layer, and finally a polyethylene sheath. The diameter is usually just 17 millimeters or 1.7 centimeters. A standard home garden hose in the US is about 16 mm. Deep sea cables must be thin because the cable's length can be as much as 12,000 kilometers. It would be very difficult to transport and lay a thick cable over long distances. Deep sea cables have always been thin. The engineering challenge is to make it thin and highly reliable.  Note that in shallow waters, usually defined as either 2,000 or 1,000 meters deep and less, the cables may have external armor in the form of steel wires wrapped around the polyethylene sheath. This protects against fishing and anchors. The cable sample on the right is armored. An armored cable typically has one to three sets o...

Routing: Singapore/Tokyo/LA/Secaucus Equinix/Slough Equinix.

 I recommend this book on subsea cable technology. I am ordering it today for myself. https://shop.elsevier.com/books/undersea-fiber-communication-systems/chesnoy/978-0-443-29886-8

As most of you know, Kenya is one of East Africa's two subsea hubs (Djibouti is the other). The Communication Authority of Kenya requires cable operators to report total lit capacity on a quarterly basis. The chart below shows the market is tight. Only Seacom was able via a large upgrade to increase lit capacity. It appears to me the local cables are maxed out. Seacom itself is getting old. It went live in July 2009. Hence it is approaching 20 years. So it is likely unless Ciena whips up more modulation magic that Seacom is at its lifetime max capacity. Note that 2Africa data has not been integrated into the official statistics, but it is important to note that international traffic is largely between Kenya and Europe, not Kenya and South Africa. Since 2Africa remains incomplete in the Red Sea, it may not affect total lit bandwidth that much. We know the local market is tight not just from the lack of growth in lit capacity, but also the high prices that 100G waves com...

I don't see any compelling reason for totally excluding Chinese Layer 1 capacity from your network. Data should be Layer 3 encrypted in any case and most DWDM box manufacturers such as Ciena offer Layer 1 encryption. The SEA-H2X fibre optic subsea cable went live in May. It offers 200 Tbps throughput on several key routes such as Thailand/Singapore, HK/Singapore, and Malaysia/Singapore. Moreover, it is an open cable system. This means each fibre pair owner selects their submarine line termination equipment. So you might even find a non-Chinese carrier on the system who purchased spectrum or fibre pairs. SEA-H2X is a 8 fibre pair cable whose main trunk connects Singapore to two Chinese landings. Hauwei was the system integrator with China Mobile, China Unicom, and Converge as consortium members. Converge is a large Philippine fibre-to-the-home provider with 2 million subscribers.

Asia United Group East (AUG East) cable's main trunk links Tokyo and Singapore with branches to South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and possibly Indonesia (the consortium has stated the cable will land in Indonesia, but the map below shows Indonesia is off-net). Few project details are available. Fibre pair count is unknown, but it will be at least 16 and likely as much as 24 fibre pairs given the region's incredible Layer 3 traffic growth. Consortium members include Microsoft, Amazon, Singtel, the Japanese long haul carrier ARTERIA, Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan PTT), DREAMLINE (Korean competitive carrier), GLOBE Telecom, and Unified National Networks (Brunei). Like Candle, it avoids the South China Sea by hugging its perimeter in order to avoid Chinese permitting (China claims the South China Sea as territorial waters and requires Chinese government permits for all subsea cables laid in it) and put distance between itself and the large number of cables packed toget...

Candle is one of the more interesting Intra-Asian cables to go live over the next several years. It is the first 24 fibre pair system to serve this region. Total transmission capacity is 570 Tbps. This makes it one of the highest capacity cables on the planet. Like Apricot, Candle avoids the South China Sea due to Beijing's territorial claims and permitting demands. The main trunk links the inseparable couple of Tokyo and Singapore with branches into the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Consortium leaders include META, Softbank, and Telekom Malaysia. This project, like Apricot, exemplifies the geopolitics of American-Chinese rivalry. Hyperscalers avoid China and HK and exchange traffic at neutral Singapore. However, the routing is shorter than Apricot because Candle is deployed at the edge of the South China Sea as opposed to a long detour around Indonesia and up the East Coast of the Philippines. Like Apricot, Candle offers physical diversity to the usual suspects mak...

 The human brain runs on 20 to 30 watts. AI (large language models) model estimation consumes gigawatts. A teenager can learn to drive in a couple hours. In contrast, Tesla AI requires 10 billion miles of actual car driving data. And it still makes elementary driving errors like failing to stop for trains: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-22/nvidia-customers-notified-about-ai-related-price-hikes-above-15? So is betting the house on a resource-intensive, but second rate technology? Large language models appear too expensive and too mediocre in performance to be the future of AI.

The Echo cable is a 12 fibre network directly linking Singapore to California with with a Guam branching unit. Bifrost, the other cable connecting Singapore and the US, also lands in Bifrost. I believe each cable effectively serves as backup for the other because traffic can be rerouted at Guam. Both cables are only 12 fibre pairs due to the great distances involved. Its design capacity is 260 Tbps. A key feature of both Bifrost and Echo is they bypass the South China Sea even though it is part of the shortest path between Singapore and the US West Coast. Hence Chinese permits are avoided, resiliency is improved since most Intra-Asian traffic traverses the South China Sea, and the cable is more protected from Chinese tapping or attack. However, it does come as a price. The cable must be buried quite deep through the shallow Indonesian waters to minimize fishing boat or anchor damage. And Indonesia is quite slow to issue permits for new subsea cables. So two cables likely...

JAKO is a high capacity cable connecting Korea and Japan via a Busan, Korea, and a Fukuoka, Japan landing. Busan is a major Korean cable landing spot. Nine cables including JAKO land in Busan. The cable's consortium consists of Microsoft, Amazon, Arteria (important Japanese back haul carrier), and the Korean Dreamline company. Dreamline is a Korean carrier that provides tower services, metro and long haul connectivity. It is increasingly common for hyperscalers to team up with competitive carriers in Asia because the regional PTTs are viewed as difficult, slow to make decisions, and too concerned about protecting their home turf. Uncooperative is hyperscaler diplomatic language to describe the telecom incumbents. NTT is an exception to this generalization. Obviously this cable reflects Microsoft and Amazon's cloud and AI ambitions. No public information is available on the number of fibre pairs. Given the fixed costs associated with cable deployment and rapidly growing traffic,...

Apricot is one of the most exciting Southeastern Asian cable projects to be RFS next year. In fact, it is the first subsea network to be truly physically diverse from the South China Sea. The 12 fibre pair main trunk's end points are Singapore and Tokyo, but the path completely bypasses the South China Sea by detouring through Indonesia and up the Philippines' East Coast. This increases latency, but makes Apricot the natural complement for any cable system like ADC or SJC2 that goes through the South China Sea. Obviously the latency is higher than the usual suspects, but most buyers need resilient networks to keep their jobs. Apricot lands in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Guam, and Japan. The cable system has military value as it links Taiwan to the Guam, the latter being the US military command center for the Western Pacific. Its routing around the South China Sea also makes it less vulnerable to sabotage. Design capacity was originally intended to be 211 Tbps...

Although most subsea cables with Singapore POPs land at Singapore, some do not, and these exceptions are the keys to better uptime for your Layer 1 network. Five fibre pair AAE1 lands at a Penang, Malaysia CLS that has a fully diverse fibre ring for automatic route protection into Singapore. Each side of the fibre ring uses a separate bridge to cross the Malaysian/Singapore border. One side of the ring terminates at the older of the two Global Switch data centers and the other at SG3. So AAE1 neither lands at Singapore nor uses any of the Singapore cable landing stations. This is one reason why AAE1 is a 'must' for network capacity buyers. Other reasons include low latency for the Marseille/Singapore end points and relatively good pricing due to the system's high capacity. Bay of Bengal Gateway also lands in Penang, Malaysia, but my understanding is that it and AAE1 use different cable landing stations. However, I have not seen backhaul maps so I cannot clai...

Building a resilient Layer 1 network where Singapore is a major POP is very difficult. Most subsea cables land in Singapore via designated sea lanes with four to five cables per lane. This increases the risk of a dragged anchor taking many cables. Although over the last ten years there have been few or none such incidents, a network planner is judged on future performance and proper risk management. Moreover, most subsea cables land at subsea cable landing stations (only 4 in total) serving many other cables. So dividing traffic among several cables is not good enough if resiliency is the goal. Tuas CLS: Apricot, Asia Direct Cable, Bifrost, I-2SEA, I2I, IAX, Indigo West, INSICA, MIST, MVISTA, PEACE, SEA-H2X, SMW4, SMW5, SMW6, SJC, & UMO. Tanna Merah: SEAX-1, BJC2, BJC3, & ASC. Changi North: AAG, BSCS, CANDLE, C2C, Echo, JAKABARE, MIC-1, RISING 8, TGN-IA, TGN-INDICOM, & TIS. Changi South: APG, ASE, C2C, MATRIX, & SJC2. Cable landing diversity is extremely hard to achieve...

Companies like SpaceX or Anthropic are issuing junk-rated debt at 1% to 2% interest rate premiums to government bonds or around 7% to 8% in total. This creates severe financial risk. Smart investors are no longer willing to buy equity in private or publicly traded AI companies because they know they are wildly overvalued. Funding will try up as these AI services simply don't generate sufficient revenues to justify trillions and trillions in capex. They are also not cost effective due to their high energy costs. Compare the power required to estimate an LLM relative to the human brain's modest 12 to 20 watts. It is not a contest.

These two Subco-owned cable systems have experienced ongoing outages that started August 8th. Each has a shunt fault located very near the other in the Perth cable protection zone. This zone extends from shore to a depth of 2000 meters and is over 100 kilometers long. These protection zones can backfire because their width is usually just a nautical mile. So the cables are packed together like sardines and if a ship drags its anchor, then multiple outages are pretty much guaranteed. It raises the question of whether cable protection zones are really a good idea since the level of shipping pretty guarantees cable damage. In a way, cable protection zones violate the principle of resiliency via physical diversity. The most likely suspect in this case is a ship that dragged its anchor across the two cables and damaged the sheath protecting the power conductor from water. A ship has been identified that was in the area at the time the outages began. Cable repairs are slated to be complete A...

If you have ever heard someone say they bought a quarter or half fibre pair, it means they bought the right to use a slice of laser spectrum to create transport services. Think of spectrum as clay and optical waves as the finished product. The spectrum seller places a filter on a fibre pair that ensures the buyer only gets the purchased frequencies. A quarter fibre pair means they get 25% of the pair's total usable spectrum. Similarly, for a half fibre pair.  In general, the minimum commercial purchase is 560 Gigahertz. The amount of usable bandwidth depends on the modulation or encoding scheme. Complex encoding schemes generate more zeros and ones than simple ones. And they cost proportionally more. Using standard Ciena gear, you can squeeze about 2.5 terabits of usable capacity out of the 560 Ghz allotment. Below is the basic topolgy. Richard Norris of Ciena (2025 Suboptic Spectrum Working Group) created the slides.  Spectrum is like any other service. You can lease or buy i...