Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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, ...

The British empire had largely completed its Red Line cable network by 1902. This network allowed news and messages to be delivered in a few minutes or several hours at most depending on the message queue's length. It spanned the globe and formed a network ring so traffic could be routed in the opposite direction in case of disruption. It was, as Dr. Michael Delaunay has argued, a highly resilient network. Besides the ring configuration, the network relied on multiple cables between any pair of given end points to ensure uptime. The British military believed it would be impossible for an enemy to cut enough cables on any route to sever all communications between any given pair of end points. The Committee of Imperial Defense concluded that 57 cables must be shut down to isolate the British Isles from the Red Line network. The figure was 15 for Canada and 7 for South Africa. The Empire was self sufficient in terms of manufacturing the components for a subsea telegraph cable and re...

Few details are available at this point. It has been clear to me for some time that the 2Africa and Equiano networks are insufficient to meet growing African Internet traffic. This reflects two factors. First, the limited number of Equiano landings: Togo, Nigeria, Namibia, and South Africa. Secondly, the 2Africa has only 180 Tbps of capacity, but serves 17 African states. Moreover, it also serves many Middle East countries, Pakistan, and India. The Nigerian government is concerned that the country lacks subsea resiliency. Published reports hint at its desire for a new route, but it is not obvious what it would be. One possibility is a direct US-Nigeria link perhaps connecting Atlanta or Ashburn Equinix to Lagos. Or perhaps a Nigeria to France or Spain direct link. Bloomberg article on subject: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-23/nigeria-in-advanced-talks-with-google-for-new-undersea-cable. 

 At an Irish Peering event in late 2025, Geoff Bennett, Director of Solutions and Technology at Nokia, gave a presentation on the development of spatial division multiplexing. We will do a slide-by-slide exposition of his presentation. ***Geoff's estimate is that there are 570 operational fibre optic cables world wide. This makes sense given the large number of islands with subsea cables. In fact, given the efforts of the EU to extend cable to the many islands of its member states, these figures should steadily rise. Google is also ramping cable connectivity to Pacific and Indian island clusters, including Christmas Island, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Maldives, etc. ***Geoff notes that 81 cables are in planning or deployment stage. ***It is almost obligatory these days to note that these cables make possible over $10 trillion in daily global transactions, driven by financial flows and international trade.

Lagos metro data center connectivity is notorious for outages due to year-around construction with a 'I don't give a damn' attitude. Our new metro network rides new, truly diverse fibre pairs with no service affecting outages since deployment in early October. One path is aerial and the other buried. Aerial fibre can be more quickly repaired than buried fibre. All waves are route protected by default. Pricing is excellent. Services: Layer 1 10G, 100G, 400G, & 800G Waves. Terms: 1-20 Years. Payment Options: Leases & IRUs. Route Protection: Default For All Services. Cross Connects: Customer's Responsibility.

1. Ellalink connects Europe to Brazil. It offers a unique fibre optic path between Brazil and Europe. It is also much shorter than combining an Atlantic cable with a South American cable or an African cable with SACS or SAIL. Ellalink sharply lowers latency for traffic whose end points are South America and Europe. It adds resiliency as well to the regional telecom ecosystem. Wave costs are over $10K for a 10G and from the upper 20s to low 30s for a 100G.  Nonetheless, it struggled to get private funding because there is simply not a lot of traffic between Portuguese speaking Brazil and Europe. Most South American ISPs can more cheaply and conveniently do their peering and pick up content in Miami. A 100G wave from the Sao Paolo Equinix complex to the Miami NAP is now under $10K. That is a third less than going to Europe via Ellalink to pick up the same content or peer with the same counterparts. In fact, Ellalink should be cheaper than moving traffic from South America to Europe v...

This project excites many powerful groups in Europe. Scientists want to equip the cable with sensors to study the Arctic Ocean while the EU wants to strengthen its influence on the Far North and also create a unique, low latency communication link with Asia that bypasses North America. It is in large part about infrastructure sovereignty. The benefits are quite clear. Indeed, they are at first glance compelling. Right now the EU has given a few million Euros to a consortium of carriers and educational networks to design it and perhaps conduct the geophysical survey. Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated. Indeed, the project has two Achilles Heels. A single cable is likely to be down a good deal of the time. That is the track record of Arctic cables: outages take in many cases 4 to 9 months to fix. So it is necessary to build a ring, which means two diverse subsea cables. So the total project cost doubles. But that is just the beginning of the challenge. Most cable ships cannot...

The Michael Burry view is that companies are depreciating their GPUs over 5 year periods despite technological obsolescence in 18 months or less. This means negative profits and rates of return despite corporate claims to the contrary.  But heat stress also depreciates GPUs. AI Chips run marathon sessions during model estimation (training) often exceeding a month and GPUs often fail due to heat stress: "Imagine you had a 10,000 or even a 20,000 GPU data center. You should expect on the statistics a chip to fail about every 3 or 4 hours. So long before I get to the point where I’m rapidly turning these over because there’s a new generation of chips, I’m turning over a vast chunk of my chips just because they’re failing under thermal stress." Source: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-paul-kedrosky. GPUs used to estimate large language models are like ultra-marathon (50, 100, and 166 kilometers) runners on a 38 degree day.  It took Facebook 54 days to estimate the ...

 Dear Readers,  The International Telecom Union is hosting a meeting in Portugal in February to debate and discuss the resiliency of subsea cables. I think the debates will be lively. I encourage you to attend. I hope to be there myself. As I am not a member of any big international organization or company in the industry, it may be challenging to get attendance approval.  Regards,  Roderick. 

A point: Ashburn Equinix or 56 Marietta, Atlanta. Z point: Madrid Interxion 2. Term: 3 Years Bandwidth: 100G. Service: Layer 1. MRC: $5,990. NRC: $0.

The consortium has been coy regarding its plan to bypass the Red Sea. My initial guess was that SMW6's main trunk would land in Oman and head across the Saudi Arabian desert to Egypt. I know more now. The main trunk will land in Bahrain and Kuwait and then go overland to Jeddah. If you view the map, you can see there is a highway making an almost straight line from Bahrain via Riyadh to Jeddah. This approach makes sense because it uses an existing right of way and hence sharply reduces deployment costs. I don't know whether existing terrestrial SA fibre was used or new stuff blown through an empty conduit. Any Saudi terrestrial capacity will be very expensive although pricing may have been tempered by the desire to get the consortium to adopt the route as part of the main trunk. It will be interesting to see if Blue-Raman, Africa-1, 2Africa, and other stalled projects follow a similar path. Such an outcome would be upsetting for many Middle Eastern in the vicinity of the Red Se...

The LEO satellite business model is one of the most interesting topics in telecommunications today. LEO satellites are not a 'new technology'. It is really just a new approach to providing Internet access without any intellectual or patent moat to prevent the entry of new competitors. There could be a know how moat, but the number of LEO satellite networks entering the market over the next 5 year suggests it is very shallow. LEO satellites provide Last Mile access using low Earth orbits ranging from 300 kilometers (180 US miles) to 2,000 kilometers (1200 miles). Each bird as they are affectionately called in the industry takes only 90 to 120 minutes to complete an orbit. Their orbits can take a variety of shapes. For example, a LEO orbit could be elliptical in order to achieve a closer approach to the Earth at some points along the path for more detailed image or data collection. Or the LEO could fly longitudinally from North Pole to South Pole and back again. Hence LEO satelli...

Both Indigo West and SJC are experiencing outages. I suggest trying ADC as non-Chinese capacity is available on favorable terms for three year contracts. TATA and TELIN are good choices. I can help with either of them. For Chinese capacity, I believe China Unicom has some very aggressive deals as well. Contact Omer Tariq in London or Georgio Garguillo in Milano.  SJC went live in 2013. Its design capacity is 28 Tbps and the cable has six fibre pairs. It connects mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, and Thailand. Both Sub.com and NEC built the system. The SJC consortium is large and includes China Telecom, China Mobile International, KDDI, Taiwan PTT, Singtel, TOT, Google, and a subsidiary of the Brunei PTT. 

***No European terrestrial routes are more subject to outages than those linking EU nations to Turkey via Bulgaria. Many so-called diverse routes share a common pinch point, namely the same conduit system alongside a Bulgarian road that goes to the Turkish border. Rumor has it that this conduit system was not properly permitted and hence lacks proper legal protection. Construction-caused outages are rampant on the Bulgarian side of the border. Outages peak in the summer.  ***Fully diverse diverse routes linking Sofia Telepoint to Mednautilus, Istanbul. Several border crossings. Three year 100G wave MRC: 6500€. No use of oil or gas pipelines. Two fully diverse 100G waves are 12K Euros.

Outage started 36 hours ago. No information available other than customers are reporting no data passing their links. If you need Australia connected to Singapore, it is possible to create a protect path via Guam. But it will not be cheap.