Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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...

Teset Capital is financing a $100 million, 12 fibre pair cable directly linking Valencia, Spain to Genoa, Italy. The network includes POPs in Madrid, Valencia, Genoa, and Milano. It is a remarkably high capacity system designed for 32 Tbps per fibre pair. This implies a 384 Tbps aggregate transmission rate. The cable will land at Sparkle's Genoa CLS and also at a carrier neutral CLS in Valencia. This cable is part of a bigger project. Teset along with two other investment groups owns both the Barracuda cable and the affiliated Valencia Digital Port Connect Project. The project includes the Valencia cable landing station where Barracud will land as well as a nearby data center.  A social media post suggests that Sparkle has acquired fibre pair capacity on the wet segment. It also suggests Sparkle is providing or selling backhaul services. Details are important. If Sparkle is providing lit Layer 1 services to Madrid and Milano, then the project is unlikely to suceed. End-to-end cost ...

I build low energy homes. One of the best building insulators are vacuum insulated panels, which have a dense core of fiber glass from which all gases been removed. Any vacuum, like space, eliminates the convection and conduction of heat. Hence the only way for heat to flow is via thermal radiation. But thermal radiation is long wavelength. In other words, it doesn't carry a lot of energy. Hence thermal radiation is low intensity, and consequently, the radiating object cools very slowly. An object at 20 degrees placed in outer space will only radiate 500 watts per square meter of surface area. The temperature falls one centigrade every three to four minutes. Not exactly like the science fiction depictions where someone is ejected from an air lock and freezes instantaneously.  On earth we use convection to dissipate heat. Air and water are the usual media. This is just much more efficient than radiation will ever be. For more details on the woes of cooling orbital data centers click...

 Amazon LEO is showing the world that the satellite wars are just beginning. A recurring Silicon Valley theme has been that Starlink has a long term global monopoly on LEO telecommunication services. In fact, the term is 'global public utility'. Starlink supposedly has scale advantages and benefits from an insurmountable cost edge due to vertical integration in the form of satellite manufacturing and launching services. This is of course sheer hogwash. While SpaceX has a cost edge right now, it has no technology moat to preserve an edge long term over the rest of the industry. There is no patent barrier to creating a reusable launch vehicle. Several players including Blue Origin and the Chinese are close to perfecting reusable rockets. Just like Starlink, LEO is manufacturing its own satellites and its per unit costs are steadily falling. AT&T has agreed to migrate computer work loads to AWS with some of it involving Amazon's Outpost service. This involves Amazon provid...

A point: Most Mumbai carrier neutral data centres. Z point: SG5, Singapore. Term: 3 Years. MRC: $38K. NRC: $20K. Customer responsible for cross connects.

A couple years ago BTG Pactual Infrastructure Fund II purchased the subsea operator, GlobeNet, as well as a South American fibre optics backbone company, OI, and combined those assets with a couple of data centers. Globenet's main asset, its cable linking New Jersey to Sao Paulo, is near end of life. But its cable landing stations face no such expiration date. Moreover, the Fortaleza CLS is a well known peering point with a lot of customers. BTG put all the telecom assets in a telecom infrastructure subsidiary known as V.TAL. At PTC in Hawaii V.TAL announced its plan for a 16 fibre pair, 320 Tbps subsea cable that will link the Sao Paulo Equinix data centers to Secaucus Equinix and probably also the NASDAQ and NYSE data centers in Carteret and Mahwah, New Jersey. The Globenet assets will accelerate the project because Synapse will use its cable landing stations in Tuckerton and Fortaleza as well as some of the existing US back haul fibre. The OI backbone, purchased f...

The private equity firm Cerberus has taken a majority equity stake in Datawave Networks, a Cyprus-based subsea cable developer. Datawave's key project is to deploy a linear 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable linking UAE, Oman, Mumbai, Chennai, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Datawave began this project in 2019 when the company was incorporated. But due to the increasing dominance of American Tech Giants, investors have been reluctant to fund private wholesale network operators. It is simply seen as too risky given lack of hyperscaler demand for leased subsea network capacity. Due to the Cerberus acquisition, SING is now fully funded with Subcom expected to complete the project in 2030. I believe part of what drove Cerberus' interest in this project was the Red Sea bottleneck. While building Marseille to Singapore would be viewed as too risky given the required capital, linking the new subsea cable hub of Oman to Singapore seems like a...

Blue Origin is a Jeff Bezos' startup providing space services to NASA and other clients. Those services include cargo delivery, rocket engines, lunar landing vehicles, and under development, a commercial space station. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket carries as much cargo as SpaceX' Starship and successfully launched a NASA probe in late 2025. The first stage is reusable.  New Glenn's success has encouraged Blue Origin to develop new satellite constellations. The company announced yesterday a hybrid network of 5,280 LEO and 128 MEO satellites called Terawave that will use dual free space lasers and radio frequencies to communicate with the Earth. Radio frequency will provide a minimum committed bit rate of 144 Gibabits per second, many magnitudes greater than what Starlink offers, with free space lasers boosting the throughput by 6 terabits in ideal weather conditions. Dual connectivity is not a new idea. Low latency financial trading platforms have been using microwave ...

EUNetworks offers standard VLAN services for connectivity to public clouds and data centers and also standalone dedicated Ethernet private line. The Ethernet private line is a dedicated service and port product. It is fully protocol transparent. All Ethernet lines are MPLS protected by default. While the primary path is static, the protect path is dynamic. Circuit restoration varies from 50 milliseconds to to a few hundred milliseconds depending on routing. Bandwidth is highly granular. It ranges from 10 megabits to 100 gigabits. Ethernet private line is ideal for companies and governments because the MPLS protection core includes so many routing paths that downtime is extremely limited. EUNetworks has thousands of Ethernet-enabled Layer 2 sites in Western Europe. Approximately a 100 sites allow for provisioning in a few minutes. APIs are available for ordering and monitoring service. Routing options include point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and multipoint to multipo...

The cable ship has repaired one fault, but discovered at least one other fault in shallow water. Repair of the second fault begins soon.