Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The illustration on top shows the Arctic cable's main predator: icebergs. In waters 500 meters or less deep, floating icebergs carve grooves in the seabed floor. These scars are typically one to two meters deep with the record being 15 meters. A fair number of grooves are carved 5 to 8.5 meters into the floor. Known as ice scouring, icebergs have left marks in water as deep as a thousand meters. These comments apply to both the North Pole and the Antarctic. Cables connecting either region to the rest of the world face this challenge. According to a US Government Geological survey, Canada's Beaufort Sea, highlighted in blue, has at least 2,200 ice scouring marks on its sea floor. Quintillion's cable extends into this region. Any cable linking Europe to Asia via the Arctic must go through the Bering Sea. Geological surveys have shown that ice scouring happens every year in the Bering Sea as wind and currents drive ice floes across waters as shallow as 20 meters. Although the ...

Once upon a time we crammed over 20 cables into the Red Sea, gave a lot of money to Egypt's toll collectors, and patted ourselves on the back. Lack of physical diversity? Hey, my consortium buddies see no problems. Let's go have coffee, tea or a beer. Yes, Israel and a good part of the Arab world were in a quiet war. Yes, most governments in the region have no democratic legitimacy and still monitor their people's emails using deep packet inspection. Yes, there are massive economic inequities. Yes, huge religious tensions between Islamic moderates, theocratic Iranians, Shiites, Sunnis, the secular faction, and Messianic Jewish settlers. But hey, everything is cool, so let's keep doing what we've been doing all along. 🙂  Then the world blew up. Yemen has disintegrated into three factions and the Houthis can destroy any ship entering the Red Sea. It took Omantel a half year to convince the Houthis to allow a cable ship to repair Seacom, AAE1, and EIG. ...

Iceland's New Audur Subsea Cable Farice is building a new 16 to 24 fibre pair cable named after an Icelandic matriarch, Audur The Deep Minded, who sailed from Scotland to Iceland in the 9th century during the first wave of migration to the island. The cable lands in Southeast Iceland and in Scotland near Glasgow. The Icelandic backhaul will be fibre, but the British side is most likely spectrum. Farice views Audur as a replacement for the 22 year old FARICE-1. The ship survey will take place in the summer of 2027 with RFS planned for 2030. Audur falls into the monster capacity cable category. Sixteen fibre pairs can easily achieve 320 Tbps with 24 fibre pairs almost reaching a half petabit per second. What is really striking about this is Iceland's population, which although rapidly increasing due to immigration, is just shy of 400K. Undoubtedly, this reflects Farice's bullish assessment of data center demand driven by cheap hydro power and modest cooling needs. Although Ic...

Quintillion was really formed to build a subsea cable from Japan to Europe via the North Pole. It acquired the assets, mostly human capital and preliminary research, of Arctic Fiber in 2016, and as a first step deployed a North Alaskan subsea cable serving coastal communities plus some terrestrial fibre. See the map below on the left.  No expense was spared protecting it from the harsh environment. Quintillion was buried 3.5 to 4.5 meters deep, probably a record, and for landings a bore pipe was deployed. Nonetheless, it was an ultra-high risk project. Icebergs gouge the sea floor as they float. It is called ice scouring. They carve trenches as deep as 15 meters into the sea floor. The fact is that there is no viable protection against them. Moreover, there were no icebreaker cable ships to fix the cable in case of outages. This meant that outages during autumn, winter or spring could not be fixed until late summer. As an example, Quintillion's most recent outage began in January 2...

Amazon plans to dominate the business market for LEO connectivity. Its Ultra phase array antenna in satellite field tests with corporate beta users has simultaneously clocked 1.2 gigabits down and 400 megabits up. Indeed, LEO management has publicly stated that its download performance will be 2x better than Starlink's and enjoy 6x to 8x better uplink performance. The uplink edge is essential to Amazon's strategy. While residential Internet traffic is lopsided with downloads predominating, business and network applications are often symmetric or nearly. Even Starlink's 400 megabit service requires several hours to upload large gigabyte files.   Amazon is targeting mobile operators and IoT aggregation hubs for its 1 gigabit service. Mobile towers are often long distances from the nearest fibre optic network in many countries. Amazon will carry the local traffic back to the mobile operator's POP or data center. Indeed, Amazon's service is ideal for remote data center...

Arianespace will carry 32 Amazon satellites into orbit on April 28th. Amazon has booked a total of 18 launches that will expand the current 250 LEO constellation to 826 birds. For context, Starlink began service in the Northern latitudes when it had 700 operating satellites. So year's end is when competition begins in earnest. However, the Starlink groupies keep trying to move the goal post. They now claim either the company with the most infrastructure wins or they claim that Amazon cannot credibly offer service unless they have several thousands LEOs up and running. But here's reality. There is no real correlation between the amount of infrastructure and business success in telecom. Nor is there is a first mover advantage in telecom. Equinix and Digital Realty were not first movers in the colo industry. But they dominate today. Free came into the French mobile market in 2007, ten years after full liberalization, yet today has over 20% market share and completely...

Lagos is one of the Big Three African subsea cable hubs. It is also notorious for metro outages. Many data center pair fibre paths have multiple outages each week. In contrast, Transmission Co is offering a new OADC/Equinix route in a unique right of way without any outages since going live in early October. Standard transport services include Layer 1 10G, 100G, 400G, and 800G waves available as leases and IRUs. All services are route protected by default and are at a discount to the 'usual suspects'. This metro is designed and managed by the well respected Mark Tinka of Seacom fame. So don't settle for under-performing, over-priced metro garbage. Order the Best from Transmission Co. Contact me and Mark for details and a no-nonsense on-the-spot offer.

META financial reports don't even have an AI revenue category, yet Zuckerberg is spending $125 billion on infrastructure of which 80% is devoted to AI. The 2025 free cash flow was amost $60 billion versus a forecasted figure of $8 billion for 2026. Zuckerberg owns 15% of META, but each share has ten voting rights attached to it. The result is a busines leader without accountability to anyone.  https://thetechcapital.com/coreweave-expands-meta-deal-by-21-billion-plots-4-25-billion-debt-raise/

A contact informed me yesterday that the Persian Gulf survey was completed in December of last year. But the plan to bypass the Red Sea using the Bahrain landing is now on hold due to the American and Israeli attack on Iran. This is a devastating blow to the project as the plan was to connect the cable landing at Bahrain to terrestrial Saudi fibre and haul the traffic overland to Jeddah where it would be put on SMW6 to Egypt. SMW6 was originally expected to be finished in December, 2024. This Persian Gulf bypass route was the consortium's main hope for finishing the project. Now everything depends on the resolution of the conflict.

I am building a thriving ecosystem around my yet-to-be-constructed Passive House. Jean, on the left, is a world class landscape architect and gardener. The plan includes a hundred large trees and 900 small ones, a large pond with running water, a greenhouse, a sauna building for the locals, and a 400 meter perimeter low energy home. Jean and I are discussing the final details prior to contract signature.

Marseille/Mumbai routes have limited capacity. No guarantee of timely repair. IAX is a new, state-of-the art system. IAX has the only high capacity Mumbai/Singapore route. A point is any major Mumbai carrier hotel. No separate backhaul charges. MRC is comprehensive. Z point is SG5. Terms up to five years. Three year 100G MRC: $35K. Volume discounts available. Customer is responsible for cross connects.

***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...

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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...