Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

This device is probably a GPON fiber splitter that takes a fiber pair and splits into many fiber pairs to serve individual homes or buildings. These devices are ubiquitous in Kenya. GPON stands for gigabit passive optical network. It is a point-to-multipoint fibre architecture that requires no power at the premise. The use of passive devices greatly simplifies the network and reduces deployment costs.

Hi Everyone, I will be in Singapore next week and am available to meet. You can reach me at roderick.beck@networksourcing.net .

Term: 2 Years. 2Africa Djibouti CLS cross connects are $125 per month and 100G backhaul to Djibouti Data Center is $1100 per month. 

A point: Most carrier neutral Mumbai data centers. Z point: SG1, Singapore. Term: 1 Year. NRC: $10K.

1. Hyperscalers are worried that a capacity shortage will materialize two or three years down the road due to robust traffic growth and the absence of any major subsea cable project in the pipeline. Their network investment teams are studying the issue. 2. 2Africa is bypassing the Red Sea by building Northeast African routes that will connect either Mombasa to the Sudan 2Africa CLS in the Red Sea or a route from Djibouti to the same CLS. Decision has not yet been made. 3. 2Africa from Mombasa to Marseille should be live next summer. This will bring relief to carriers and ISPs alike. 4. Africa-1 project is struggling and may be out of funds. 5. Mombasa is the subsea cable hub, but Nairobi is the data center for Kenya. 6. Excess capacity on Equiano and 2Africa exists and ISPs should stock up before the Telecom Winter arrives.

EIG upgrade has been delayed until 2028. Three year MRC: Under $40K for right customer. Life of system I00G wave IRU ~ $1 million. 

EXA unveiled its first home grown long haul subsea cable project today. Meridian is a 24 fibre pair cable that should reach or exceed the half petabit per second transmission milestone. It will land in New Jersey, and at Brean, UK, where EXA's low latency Express cable (a Hibernia Atlantic project that was RFS in 2015) lands. I believe EXA will deploy a prefabricated, modular cable landing station in New Jersey to ensure the physical diversity that hyperscaler clients desire. Another possibility is the NJFX facility. The term 'Meridian' can refer to the Meridian line that goes through Greenwich, UK and connects the North and South poles. The term also means 'the peak of success or excellence'.  This cable project is a gutsy move. There have no pure carrier projects connecting North America to Europe since the Express cable went live. From 2016 to the present all Atlantic cables have been hyperscaler owned and designed. So EXA is counting on hyperscalers to take fibr...

Apparently the Saudi Arabian regulator is refusing to allow local carriers to sell dark fiber to the subsea cable consortiums that desire to bypass the Red Sea. This is a big blow. Buying lit Layer 1 transport across Saudi Arabia is an economic no go for intercontinental cables. I guess I should not be surprised given Saudi women are still under the guardianship of their nearest male relatives, but it is still disappointing. 😡 Middle Eastern governments love to project themselves as progressive forces, but they often fail to implement decisive reforms. Old ways die hard.  Several reliable sources tell me that the 2Africa consortium is considering terrestrial Northeast routes to the 2Africa Sudan CLS. There are other routing options as well. Houthi occupation of key Red Sea islands this past week simply reinforces the need to bypass the Red Sea. Get it done, gentlemen.

It is not a coincidence. Starlink needs terrestrial connectivity just like any other ISP. Mombasa is the single most important East African coast subsea hub with Djibouti in second place. Notice that Starlink placed its transmitter dishes on platforms to achieve the 20 degree from horizon visibility required for their network.

A branching unit moving on a conveyor belt to be lowered into the ocean. Branching units have evolved from simply splitting the fibre pairs into two paths to switching fibre pairs and wavelengths. This enables bandwidth to be allocated to the path where demand is the greatest.

A point: IColo 1 or IColo 2. Z point: JB1. Term: 2 Years. Customer responisible for cross connects. 2Africa is the Lambourghini of African subsea cables. Better designed than other system with the possible exception of Equiano. Deeply buried in coastal waters and routed to avoid danger spots.

Details are limited, but carriers have been bidding on extending the Peace cable from Mombasa to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. I think the big drawback is the iron grip of Tanzania's state owned fibre optic network on connectivity. It has resulted in much higher Layer 1 and Layer 2 prices than in deregulated Kenya. This is a serious deterrent to investment. It means the local ISP and telecom ecosystem is small and may not be enough to sustain the minimum rate of return required to justify the project. The distance is small between Mombasa and Dar Es Salaam so I expect any cable to be unrepeatered.

1. All terrestrial route with good outage history and longest outage only 17 hours. Find a subsea cable with a record that good. 2. Three year MRC: $26.5K MRC.

TM is a consortium member of the Bay of Bengal Gateway Cable. They also own 2 fiber pairs on the low latency ASE cable. Finally, they are participating in the almost ready Echo project, Candle, and others. To the far right, Bhavin Shaw, Country Manager, UK and Europe. In the middle, Carla Netto, Senior Manager Sales and Enterprise Development.

LS1/CT1; $17,500 MRC; Two year term. LS1/OADC; $17,500 MRC; Two year term.

Amazon's core network business is cloud services. These services generate less network traffic over long distances than Google's web search and advertising busiess. Customers download their data, compute, and then retrieve it or store it there. Amazon may back up its customer's data in another data center in the same cloud region, but traffic flows from cloud region to cloud region are probably low. As a result, Amazon has been a follower in subsea cables. Often a silent or minority investor like in the Bifrost where it is getting lit capacity in exchange for providing the US landing station. In some cases, Amazon is not a consortium member, but a fibre pair customer. Amazon bought a fibre pair IRU on the Marea, which connects Virginia Beach to Spain, from Telxius. It was probably their first physical capacity ownership on a subsea cable.  More recently, Amazon announced its first solar project, Fastnet, which connects Ireland, where it owns several large data centers, to M...

 I am heading to Nairobi for ITW Africa. I will also use Nairobi as my base for visiting different African nations. Available to meet with anyone in Nigeria, South Africa, Dubai, India, and Singapore who has mutual interests in subsea cables, procurement, and network capacity sourcing. 

MRC: $19,200. Term: 2 Years. Lisbon/London backhaul route protected. 

1. The submarine line termination equipment, consisting of active electronics and transponders (lasers and optical receivers), was traditionally kept at the cable landing station. This began changing when carriers wanted to own and manage their own dedicated capacity (fibre pair or spectrum slice). Telekom Malaysia was an early example. It took two fibre pairs on the ASE cable as opposed to a fraction of the consortium lit capacity. Later the hyperscalers crystallized this evolution in the open cable model which limits common ownership to the wet segments. Each owner has either fibre pairs or spectrum and makes its own decisions concerning where to place the SLTEs. Because cable landing stations are not designed as large carrier neutral interconnection points, the SLTEs are almost always housed in a cage at a carrier netural data center. It is this flexibility in choice of location and equipment vendor that makes the open cable model so appealing. It also facilitates hyperscalers build...

This is my first trip outside the Schengen Zone in 2.5 years. I intend to stay in Nairobi as my base of operations with trips to Singapore, India, Pakistan, Dubai, Oman, South Africa, and Nigeria this autumn.