Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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...

Lasers produce coherent light. This means the electromagnetic waves have the same frequency, move in the same direction, and their phase repeats in a regular pattern. The practical implication is that the laser light remains in a tight, focused band as opposed to spreading over time. This prevents the signal strength or optical power from rapidly diminishing. However, in telecommunications, coherent optics is more than just laser light. It has two key ingredients, advanced modulation schemes that use combinations of amplitude and phase to create higher bandwidth. The other component are digital processing chips (DSPs). Laser light is subject to nonlinear errors due to chromatic and polar dispersion. The DSPs can detect these errors and recover the original pristine signal. Digital signal processing detects nonlinear errors using mathematical algorithms called forward error correction. 

A fibre optic subsea cable is encased in a polyethylene sheath. Most damage due to fishing trawlers, current abrasion, and anchors occurs in water depths 1,000 meters or less. Hence cables laid or buried in shallow waters are usually single or double armored to protect them. The armor consists of galvanized or stainless steel wires wrapped around the white polyethylene layer. Galvanized steel wire has a zinc coat that resists salt water corrosion. While armor does protect against abrasion and small mechanical forces, it is not strong to prevent the cable being torn by sea floor trawler net or a dropped or moving anchor.

A shunt fault is damage to the insulation around the power conductor that all subsea cables require for undersea optical amplification. It causes an electric short. They are most common in the deep sea where the cable lies exposed on the sea floor as opposed to near shore where burial is routine. Abrasion caused by deep sea currents that rub cables against sharp surfaces like rocks are the usual suspects. Depending on the extent of the abrasion, a shunt fault may or may not cause an outage. It depends on the ability of off-shore power facilities to compensate for a partial loss of voltage. When I was worked at Hibernia Atlantic, our cables experienced shunt faults that did not disrupt service. A cable ship would be dispatched to fix it. Below is a shunt fault on Subco's Oman/Australia cable. You can see the power burns on the eroded insulation. 

An Irish company, MDM, whose founding members have done a lot of design work for hyperscalers, has announced it is building two Trans-Atlantic cables in addition to its Pisces project that will connect Ireland to Europe. The estimated construction cost is $500 million. The network is a classic dual ring design where the Northern cable lands at Galway and on Long Island. Now there are several Long Island cable landing stations and MDM already operates one in Galway. So MDM may use these existing facilities for its project. In contrast, the Southern cable is expected to land at a new CLS on Ireland's South Coast. On the US side it will land in New Jersey where it will probably use the existing Wall Township CLS. The fibre pair will probably 16.  I have concerns about this project because there is nothing to indicate it is fully funded. In fact, the last carrier financed and led project across the Atlantic was Aquacomms' AEC-1 cable that went live in 2016. EXA recently purchased ...

Light takes .489 milliseconds or roughly a half millisecond to go 100 kilometers. Get the route miles and you have a great approximation because optical amplifiers or end point electronics have little impact. So Dunant is 13,200 kilometers CLS/CLS. That is 132 times a half millisecond or 66 milliseconds RTD. For full details, click on https://www.m2optics.com/blog/bid/70587/calculating-optical-fiber-latency. 

Google announced today three new cables: Alisios, Canoa, and Olaluz. President Trump will not be happy with the names. Not American enough. Alisios is a Spanish word denoting the trade winds that cross the Carribean and the Equator. This cable will connect the Dominican Republic to Chile via Panamanian landings. So it will include new long haul fiber routes across Panama. Canoa links the Dominican Republic to Bermuda, where both of Google's new Trans-Atlantic cables, SOL and Nuvem, will also land. So similar to the Pacific where Google is landing six cables on Guam to create its own traffic exchange point, Bermuda is becoming another major private switching center for Google traffic. Traffic between Europe and the Caribbean or the West Coast of South America can now bypass the United States, improving resiliency, yet reducing latency. Indeed, traffic between Europe and Australia can now be routed via Chile because Google's Humboldt cable will link Chile and Austra...

Two year term.

"It's not out of the question that, at some point, Starlink will operate most of the world's internet," Musk said." Despite this optimism, shares of SpaceX fell by more than 7% in after hours trading on Tuesday, wiping out gains made during the day.

 

The 2Africa cable has been up and down since Wednesday. Repair was declared completed and all services live Friday Morning Abidjan time. WACS should be fixed by Wednesday next week.

 Oracle's stock price is diving. Why? A lesson for the AI industry. An AI data center customer faces no switching costs as they are simply installing data and software in bare metal servers leased to them by the data center. The result is a buyer's market as opposed to the traditional sellers market in which Equinix and Digital Reality operate. Oracle, the software company, reinvented itself as a cloud provider and then pivoted to AI data centers when the cloud angle proved disappointing and AI became hot.  But in a traditional data center the customer installs their equipment and this makes leaving the facility very expensive and difficult as it means they lose an operating network node. In many cases the exit costs can be in the millions of Euros or dollars and require a network redesign to ensure traffic flows are not disrupted. So the traditional data center is more like the Hotel California in the Eagles song where you can check in, but never leave.  In contrast, mos...

Nvidia guaranteeing OpenAI's 250 billion in data center commitments is a huge gamble given that OpenAI is forecasting it will burn through $665 billion in cash by 2030. Nvidia's entire future depends on OpenAI's success or failure. The lack of prudence and financial discipline is astonishing. Russian roulette, anyone? History is quite clear: never finance money losing customers. Any credit check would have disqualified OpenAI using its own financial projections. For more details, https://thetechcapital.com/nvidia-to-backstop-250-billion-of-openai-data-centre-commitments/.

Just a few months ago Linkedin Prophets were proclaiming SpaceX hegemony. It was in their words 'a space utility' that would dominate space infrastructure due to 'vertical integration', Musk Infallibility, and 'rocket launch cadence'. Now their only excuse is 'short selling' as though $18 billion in annual revenues naturally implies Space is worth two trillion dollars. This inference is built on the flimsy foundation of rocket usability and 'they launch a lot of stuff into space'. In fact, SpaceX is a space trucking company. Logistics. There is no intellectual moat, and in fact, SpaceX has no patents on rocket design. Not a single one. It has an edge on rocket design, but textbook economics tells us abnormally high profits attract competition and similar designs. Just last week a Chinese company completed their first successful reusable rocket launch.

The FCC is introducing a new regulatory framework for subsea cables. The previous approach involved a Federal interagency group known as Team Telecom reviewing each cable landing and the associated owners of the subsea network. Team Telecom includes representatives of the FCC, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and Homeland Security. Moreover, advisory agencies include Department of State, Treasury, Commerce, Director of National Intelligence, Office of the US Trade Representative, and General Services Administration. Consequently, approval delays were common as well as regulatory overkill because each applicant must go through the same steps regardless of previous successful applications. The new regulatory regime places applicants in different risk buckets. Low risk applicants can bypass Team Telecom and quickly get a landing license approved. An applicant shows it is low risk by meeting the following requirements. 1. Applicant certifies compliance with ten F...