Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

***It is a racing car: 135 ms RTD Marseille to Singapore. ***One year term. ***First come, first serve. ***No haggling over price. ***Customer orders cross connects. A point: SG1. Z point: MRS2. Important: If you don't buy, your wife will divorce, your boss hate you, and your children will put themselves up for adoption. Even the old lady living next door will shake her cane at you. Even your cat will head straight to the animal shelter. 🙃

 META Loses $310 Billion In Stock Value In March: The AI Meltdown Begins In March alone META's market cap fell $310 billion driven by poor financial performance. The key metric is free cash flow, which equals cash profits minus capital expenditures. In the end free cash flow is what investors want, namely oney they could put in their pockets without impairing company operations. META's free cash flow is expected to be only $8 billion this year down from a 2025 figure of $46 billion. The company's massive AI investments are not yielding much revenue and hence are driving free cash flow to zero.  Unfortunately, the emerging AI crash will affect our industry. I anticipate the very expensive Waterworth project could be cancelled as well as other projects. AI is Zuckerberg's second big mistake. The Metaverse was his first. He only remains CEO because he is the majority owner of a special class of voting shares that gives him ten votes per share versus one vote per share for ...

The Real Lessons of Iran's Attacks on AWS Data Centers 1. The Middle East is fundamentally unstable. The entire region is bedeviled by historic conflicts based on religious divisions (Shiite, Sunni, Christian, and Jewish), distrust between Europe and Islam going back to the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire, a lack of strong independent institutions, weak rule of law, lack of democratically legitimate governments, and limited acceptance of the notion of secularism (the idea that religion and government should be strictly separate to maximize freedom and ensure equal treatment). Even the so-called benevolent monarchies that border the Persian Gulf have absolute power and absolute power always corrupts in the end. Monarchies are outdated institutions. Don't imagine or suggest otherwise. Recent governments in the region have promised stability and peace, but extremism abounds. Israel's ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Afghanistan's repression of women, Trump's foolish acts of a...

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...

Red Sea capacity is tight. Buy now or your boss will beat you. 😀 One year term. You order cross connects. 

The agency (SUPO) released their 2026 National Review a few days ago: https://supo.fi/en/growing-tensions-in-the-baltic-sea . It stated that Russia has not engaged in sabotage against Finland. The agency did not qualify that statement in any respect. So in their view there is no evidence that sabotage is responsible for outages of power or fibre optic cables landing in Finland. The majority of the Baltic Sea cable outages have involved Finland. 1. The agency notes that Russia sabotaging cables would not be in its self-interest as it might jeopardize the Baltic Sea freedom of navigation crucial to its war effort. "According to the SUPO’s assessment, Russia is making every effort to safeguard its opportunities to practise free shipping. The country will not take any voluntary risks that could deteriorate its freedom of navigation. To Russia, the Baltic Sea is also an undersea channel to the West: most of the network traffic from Russia to the West is transmitted via c...

A point: San Jose Equinix. Z point: Ashburn Equinix. Service: 2x 100G Waves. Routing: Fully Diverse. Term: 3 Years. Total MRC: $5,500

A point: 1 Wilshire or Coresite 2. Z point: Telehouse London.  Service: Layer 1.  Bandwidth: 10G.  Term: 2 Years.  Customer handles cross connects.  Subsea Cable: No outages in last six years.  UK Backhaul: Diverse to cables landing at Bude.   Special Deal: Two fully diverse 10Gs between these end points for $3500 total per month on a 1 year term.

 "For decades, the Red Sea was the highway of the global internet. Thousands of kilometres of subsea cables snaked beneath its waters, carrying the vast majority of digital traffic between Asia and Europe. It was cheap, it was direct, and it worked. Then the Houthis started firing. Since late 2023, two major outages have each severed four subsea cables at once, paralysing connectivity across one of the globe’s most vital digital arteries. While the physical damage to infrastructure was significant, it proved far less disruptive than the agonising delays in repairs. With the Red Sea corridor choked by conflict and uncertainty, the world’s reliance on these fragile links has been thrown into sharp relief, exposing just how vulnerable global internet traffic remains in the face of geopolitical turmoil. “The outages in themselves are not the problem,” says Roderick Beck, an independent subsea cable consultant with deep relationships across the hyperscaler and wholesa...

In a conversation I had today with the editor of Capacity Media, I suggested the top challenge for the global subsea cable industry over the next five years is how to thread intercontinental traffic through the Middle East to Europe, India, and Asia. Trump's attack on Iran has shut down the Persian Gulf, which many subsea cable consortiums viewed as their best hope for a Red Sea bypass route. If wet segment outages happened, there would be no way to repair them today, just like the Red Sea off Yemen. Thank you, Donald.  In fact, SWM6 goes up the Persian Gulf and lands at Bahrain. It is linked to fibre along a highway from Bahrain to the cable landing station in Saudi's Arabia's resort city of Jeddah. So the SMW6 bypass uses the Persian Gulf up to Bahrain, traverses the Desert, and then rides the Red Sea to an Egyptian CLS. In addition, persistent rumors suggest that Blue-Raman will traverse Kuwait as part of a terrestrial route to reach the Red Sea. I don...

Mumbai/Singapore; IAX Cable; 100G Wave; $35K MRC; 3 Years. Secaucus Equinix/Ashburn Equinix; 100G Wave; Diverse to Usual Suspects; $1,350 MRC; 5 Years. Ghana/Nigeria; 2Africa Cable; 100G Wave; $20.5 MRC; 3 Years. LA Coresite/Slough Equinix; Route protected 10G; $3250 MRC; 1 Year. Dallas Equinix/Ashburn Equinix; 100G; $2200 MRC; 3 Years. Singapore/California; 10G; SEA-US; $7500 MRC; 2 Years.  Singapore/Tokyo; 100G; ADC; $15K MRC; 3 Years.  Singapore/Marseille; 100G; Peace; Non-Chinese carrier & equipment; $19.5K MRC; 3 Years.  Tallinn/Amsterdam; 100G; $2500 MRC; 3 Years.  Sofia/Istanbul; 100G; Highly stable and diverse paths; $6,500 MRC; 3 Years.

The FCC's authority to regulate subsea cables is grounded in the 1921 Cable Landing License Act. The legislation's language is vague. Hence it is open to interpretation. In late 2025 the FCC issued a very long and tedious-to-read 214 page ruling that clarified its stance on a number of important issues. The document is attached to this post. 1. The FCC via the 1921 legislation is responsible for issuing licenses for cable landings on any American territory whether a State, territory (like Puerto Rico) or island. It regards any subsea cable that lands on US territory and traverses non-territorial waters as requiring an operating license. Any cable that remains within US territorial waters is exempt. See https://www.fcc.gov/cable-landing-license-act . Many carriers disagree with the current FCC interpretation. They argue that any cable connecting two points of United States territory is exempt. Not surprisingly, the FCC has rejected this view. It has pointed out t...

Major player is offering 100Gs on Bay of Bengal Gateway and IAX Cables with an unbeatable package discount. ***BBG and IAX are fully diverse end-to-end cables. A. IAX 100G waves from most carrier neutral Mumbai data centers to SG3. B. BBG 100G waves from Chennai to Singapore via a Malaysian landing protected terrestrial backhaul to Singapore. Two 100G waves, one 100G IAX (Mumbai/Singapore) and one 100G BBG (Chennai/Singapore) for $68.5K MRC total.

***Company's IPO target of $1.5 trillion translates to paying $75 billion for every billion in expected 2026 revenue ($20 billion).  ***By any reasonable historical measure SpaceX stock is wildly expensive, in part due to the half trillion dollar value assigned to X, a mature company losing one billion dollars each year. Calling X 'AI' doesn't change the fact it is a social media ghetto abandoned by everyone left of the Extreme Right. Moreover, Grok is not a breakthrough technology. It is just another large language model digital parrot.  ***The only way to rationalize the likely IPO price is to assume that Starlink is a natural monopoly. This is a remarkably dubious assumption given that Starlink's competitors will operate tens of thousands of LEOs and MEOs, most of which are higher capacity than the existing Starlink fleet. The enormous LEO/MEO capacity that goes live over the next five years will easily saturate the market and crash pricing. Winners and losers is...

Photonic computing is like hollow core fibre. The advantages are so great in each case that their long term adoption appears almost inevitable. Logic gates in traditional silicon-based computing rely on using electric charges to represent binary information. The drawbacks are quite clear. The electricity becomes heat. In the presence of high transistor density this translates to calculation errors as well as hardware failure. In turn, high heat requires cooling systems and more electricity. Indeed, electricity is the largest operating expense for a data centre. In 2025 Equinix facilities consumed 8.6 Terawatt hours. A good guess is that at least 60% of the firm's cost of revenues is power. In 2025 the Equinix cost of revenue totalled $4.5 billion so power costs were at least $2.7 billion.  In contrast, photonic computers uses infrared lasers on chips. This consumes a fraction of the power that silicon wafers need. Residual heat is minuscule so the cooling demand drops substantially...

Google announced today a $15 billion dollar infrastructure investment in India that includes a new cable landing station in Visakhapatnam (Vizag), a Mumbai to Perth subsea link, a cable connecting Vizag to Singapore via a Malaysian landing (like Bay of Bengal Gateway), a subsea network between Chennai and Vizag, and a major cable from Vizag to Capetown. Although hyperscalers are frequent targets of criticism, one cannot say they lack ambition. 😀 Google's connectivity investments aim to create seamless, high capacity cables connecting India to the US using new and physically diverse routes. 1. First cable from India's West Coast to Australia. 2. First Indian  cable to South Africa. 3. Creation of a third Indian subsea hub in Vizag to improve cable landing diversity. 4. A cable link between India's two East Coast subsea and telecom hubs. 5. India's second cable to reach Singapore via Malaysian overland routes. Remarks: 1. I think Sify is like to be the cable landing oper...

 African subsea cable leased capacity prices have bottomed around $18K to $22K MRC per 100G per month for Equiano and 2Africa. Examples include Lisbon to Lagos and Ghana to Lagos. Prices are not going lower. First of all, Google kept some Equiano capacity for itself and Facebook kept 4 of 2Africa's 16 pairs for itself. Moreover, 2Africa lands in over 25 countries. So average capacity per country excluding Facebook is approximately 6 Tbps. That figure would fall further if the Red Sea segment is ever completed. Finally, all consortium members for both cables are keeping some capacity for their own Internet backbones. Corroborating evidence that prices will remain stable is that consortium carriers are reluctant to sell wavelength or spectrum IRUs. Carriers sell IRUs for two reasons. The first is network asset portfolio rebalancing. If a carrier has plentiful capacity on cable X with relatively low pricing, it might sell an IRU to obtain capacity on cable Y that it can ...

The provider owns a Peace cable fibre pair and is not subject to Chinese security regulations or jurisdiction. All submarine line termination equipment is Nokia. A point: Marseille Digital Realty. Z point: SG1 or Global Switch, Singapore. Term: 3 years. Service: Layer 1. Bandwidth: 100G Wave. MRC: $18.5K Customer responsible for cross connects.

I got an instant message from an Australian ISP late yesterday my time saying my information was out-of-date and that the cable was almost completely repaired. Indigo West is now passing traffic. "We are pleased to confirm that all three faults affecting the Indigo West cable system have now been fully repaired and resolved, with services restored and stable. A summary of the faults, including their locations and resolution status, is provided below: • Fault #1 – A Fibre break in Indonesian Waters that was successfully repaired on 19/01/2026. • Fault #2 – A Partial fibre break off the coast of Perth in shallow waters that was confirmed successfully repaired on 10/02/2026 at 10:57 UTC. • Fault #3 – A shunt fault in Indonesian Waters approximately 380-410km away from Fault #1 location, inland towards Singapore was successfully repaired on 03/02/2026. All traffic has been restored and services are now operating normally. We will continue to monitor the Indigo West closel...

Logos Space is a new LEO satellite provider that plans to put over four thousand LEO birds into seven orbital shells in the 870 to 920 kilometer span above the Earth. Logos is taking an unusual approach. Its target market includes businesses and governments, but excludes households. Instead of Internet, Logos offers highly secure Layer 2 MPLS Ethernet services. These are the core products, not transit. To improve security over traditional satellite services, it is operating in the high frequency V and E spectrum bands along with the lower frequency K band. This enables the use of narrow beams to connect the customer premise equipment to a satellite. These narrow beams are much more difficult to intercept for eavesdropping or jamming.  Most LEO constellations provide exclusively Layer 3 services. Satellite frequency spectrum is a finite, strictly limited resource. So overbooked or oversubscribed transit has been the only service that traditionally made economic sense. N...