Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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...

It turns out that the CS Sovereign, a Global Marine ship whose home port is Portland, UK, is sailing down the West African cost to Abidjan to fix WACS. Why was the Sovereign chosen when it is so far away? Every cable system has one or two storage depots where fibre is kept for repairs. WACS spare fiber and other repair supplies are kept at Brest, France. Now Orange Marine has a cable ship, the well known Léon Thévenin, at anchor in Capetown, South Africa. But if the supply depot is in Europe, a nearby cable ship becomes useless. It all makes eminent sense because WACS connects both the UK and Lisbon to West Africa and the cable was laid from the UK to Lisbon and down the West African coast. So the starting point for deployment was Europe and hence that is where the spare supplies are located. However, this is a severe logistical mistake since most WACS outages occur between Senegal and Congo, not in European waters.

Fear is gripping the SpaceX Faithful as they watch their Dreams of Dominating the Galaxy evaporate in the harsh glare of market financial scrutiny. Short term the market is a voting machine. But long term, it's a calculating machine. August 5th is the quarterly earning release. It will show more massive losses just like 1Q2026. Moreover, the investors that financed SpaceX as a private company will soon be able to sell their shares and given the downward price trajectory, they will not hesitate to sell. 😉 I think the stock's fair value is in the 30s. I recommend a buy when it gets there. 😄

The cable ship repair permit has been granted. It is expected to arrive off Abidjan on July 22nd. The 2Africa cable will be the first repaired despite its outage being limited to the Cote d'Ivoire branch. WACS repair is expected to begin at the month's end. The ASN Ile D'Ouessant cable ship left Capo Verde last week and will arrive in the Gulf of Guinea this Wednesday.

Goldman Sachs, the lead for the public offering, justified the $150 IPO price based on the assumption that SpaceX 2025 revenues of $18.67 billion would grow to $474 billion in 2030, including the AI division, which generated $3 billion in 2025, growing to $322 billion in 2030. Given that most of of the AI division's data center space has been leased to third parties in the last several months, this may be a bit generous. 🙃  The entire Goldman Sachs forecast was grounded in the premise that SpaceX will dominate the AI space. Yet its own employees don't use its trademark Grok product and the AI division's subscription growth is 24% per annum with total 2025 revenues of $3 billion. In contrast, OpenAI's revenues for the same year were $25 billion with a 233% annual growth rate. 

Keppel is a member of the Bifrost Consortium. It is essentially arbitraging the difference between per pair consortium cost and what third parties are willing to pay for them. The arbitrage business model comes back to the beginning of telecommunications competition when voice carriers engaged in various kinds of arbitrage to lure customers away from the incumbents. Note Keppel sells no lit services. You must go to Telin today for lit Bifrost services, at least until some of these fibre pair purchases turn into lit wholesale capacity.

Stocks of publicly traded companies including Coreweave, META, Microsoft, and Oracle have lost 4% to 39% of their stock market value over the last year. Coreweave's core business is building data centers stocked with GPUs to rent AI service providers for estimation and inference. Obviously, this makes the standard data center look downright capital light. Racks must be populated with servers and GPUs and capable of handling 120Kw power loads. So power infrastructure and backup alone cost many multiples more on a per square meter basis than the standard telecom hotel. Moreover, these data centers must be bigger because a large language model might have trillions of parameters to be estimated. Coreweave's massive debt loads have led to a 37% decline in its market value over the last twelve months.  Secondly, customer switching costs are very low in the AI data center market. AI service providers are software companies. They download their data into the bare metal ...

NTT and Mitsui Leasing have teamed up together with fibre optic cable manufacturer Sumitomo Corporation to fund a 16 fibre pair subsea cable costing $500 million. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the second project on which NTT Data and Mitsui Leasing have cooperated. The high capacity 20 fibre pair Juno cable was the first project. It is unusual to see a large incumbent player like NTT undertaking a subsea cable project with a non-telecom company as co-owner. But the advantages are clear. Mitsui will contribute cash, but not play a major role in design, vendor selection or wholesale commercials. So it not only reduces NTT's risk by sharing funding requirements, but it gives NTT a free hand in decision making. One lesson that has become perfectly clear is that large carrier consortiums increase the likelihood of deployment delays and lengthen the entire planning cycle because decisions require consensus. Moreover, the consensus requirement makes it difficult for new approaches...

MRC: $32.5K. A point: Most Mumbai DCs. Z point: SG3.  Cable: IAX.

The well respected wide area network carrier has lit a new, shorter path connecting Milano and Paris data centers. While I believe you should never limit yourself to one vendor, EUNetworks is a very safe choice because it does the fundamentals well and is commercially flexible. The new route spans 1057 kilometers. EU did not provide a latency estimate, but it takes roughly 5.1 microseconds to traverse a kilometer. So multiply by 1057*2 and the RTD is approximately 10 ms. One diversity edge is that the route avoids Lyon. I recommend network planners consider to further diversity their network portfolio and reduce risk as a financail analysts might say. 

A consortium consisting of TATA Communications, Lightstorm, Microsoft, and Singtel just announced a new 16 fibre pair subsea network tailored to serve the AI data center markets in Hyderabad, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. It includes two Indian landings, one in Southern Chennai and another at Machilipatnum, the latter being the shortest path to Hyderabad. Both Hyderabad and Lumpur host large numbers of data centers equipped with GPUs for rent to estimate AI large language models. Conversely, Singapore is a distribution point for estimated AI models. What is sometimes called AI inference. Both space and power in the city state are too limited and expensive for AI model estimation. Besides the Singapore and Indian landings, there will likely be a cable branch landing in the Malaysian province of Selangor, chosen because it is the shortest way to reach Kuala Lumpur. Public information on the new system is sparse, but it is also likely that cable will include be extended to Hyderabad and Ch...

Bypass the Red Sea and Persian Gulf quagmires as well as China and Chinese equipment. No Russian paper. Save at least 40 to 60 milliseconds over subsea routes via the Indian ocean.

SpaceX is the most over-valued stock in the Solar System with a stock valuation 100x current sales The smart money that invested in SpaceX as a private company knows it is wildly over-valued and will sell their stock when the IPO lockup periods expire this autumn. The float, the amount of shares registered for public trading, will increase 20% to 30%. That is a huge increase in supply. Moreover, the bond market, the best measure of risk, is pricing SpaceX bonds as junk. Unlike equity, bond investors are level headed and don't give a damn about technology hype. Only financials matter in the end. For a recent forecast of the impending implosion: https://finance.biggo.com/news/0e4c9f77-64fb-4bba-8193-43f26b36b74f. 

Another 29 Amazon satellites lifted into orbit yesterday. Total Amazon transmission capacity is now 396 Tbps. This is enough to begin initial service beginning of third quarter. The Musk Tribe has consistently told me that Amazon needs thousands of LEOs to begin service. Given Amazon's inked contracts with Delta Airlines, Apple, Vodafone, AT&T, and Hitachi construction company, it appears the Tribe was wrong. 😄It should be noted that Amazon's satellites are much higher capacity than Starlink's first generation, and Starlink began operations with 700 lower capacity LEOs. https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/07/03/amazon-set-to-launch-leo-its-rival-to-spacexs-starlink-internet-later-this-year

Fastnet is a 16 fibre pair submarine network landing in Maryland and in Southern Ireland near Castlefreke. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the first cable in perhaps ten years to land in Ireland and the first landing ever in Maryland. The Irish landing makes perfect sense; Amazon has roughly 350,000 m2 of data center space in the country. It hosts an important cloud region (eu-west-1) there in large part due to a very low corporate tax rate. In addition, it just received clearance to build three data centers near Dublin totaling usable space of 42,585 m2. The choice of Maryland again shows that the hyperscalers value resiliency versus latency more than do the wholesale carriers and telecom incumbents. The latter focus on low latency routes for both Internet backbone and financial trading firms. The main US East Coast telecom hubs are Secaucus Equinix and Ashburn Equinix. If latency was Amazon's top priority, Maryland would not have been the landing point. The sa...

A turbidity current is the likely culprit for the WACS trunk outage. The same holds true for the 2Africa Ivory Coast branch failure. The Taiwan earthquake of December 2006 is instructive in this regard. The 22 knocked out cables failed in sequence over the course of several hours. So the sheer force of the earthquake was not responsible. Instead, the seismic event caused sediment to begin moving down the undersea slope of Taiwan's continental shelf. This was not a gentle slope, but rather the steep sides of the Kaoping subsea canyon, which is 4 kilometers deep. As the chart shows, cables went dark in sequence radiating from the epicenter outward as this undersea tidal wave traveled down the sides of the subsea canyon. The turbidity current traveled at speeds ranging from 3.7 meters per second to 5.7 meters (roughly 20 kilometers per hour). The sequence of events suggests there were at least 2 and probably turbidity currents involved.  It is probably not a coincidence ...

Heavy rains in Côte d'Ivoire likely caused rivers to dump large amounts of sediment at high speed into the Atlantic. These undersea mud Tsunamis accelerate down the deep gradient of the continental shelf off Abidjan and destroy anything in their path. In particular, they displace the sea floor up to several meters. It is likely that a turbidity current effectively disinterred the WACS trunk and severed it. The main value of WACS is moving traffic between Africa and Europe. So this outage imposes severe hardship on African ISPs. Outages off Côte d'Ivoire's shore are common and have disrupted Internet service in the country many times. For example, in 2024 a debris slide in the subterranean canyon off Abidjan took out four cables, including WACS. Côte d'Ivoire really needs high capacity fibre optic links into neighboring countries to better weather these network crises.

ISPs in Ghana are reporting their 2Africa waves are up and running. So 2Africa's main trunk appears untouched. Hence the Cote d'Ivoire outage must be due to a branching segment fault. It is thought a turbidity wave caused the damage. This is a powerful surge of water, debris, and mud that can wash away the sediment covering buried cables and snap them like toothpicks. I call it an underwater Tsunami. It is triggered by an undersea avalanche due to an earthquake or a flooding river like the Congo pouring into the Atlantic. For example, the 2006 Taiwanese earthquake caused a turbidity current that tore apart 22 cables off the country's Southeast coast. This current traveled several hundred kilometers and reached speeds as high as 72 kilometers an hour. It is not clear what caused the turbidity surge off Abidjan. What we do know is that there is a large subterranean cavern, Le Trou Sans Fond, at Abidjan's doorstep. It was likely involved.  The last few days Cote d'Ivoi...

This was initially diagnosed as a shunt fault, but the cable appears to be effectively severed with the approximate location of 9 kilometers from repeater 4 towards repeater 3. To the best of my knowledge this is 2Africa's first wet segment outage on the West African coast. No repair date is available at this time.