Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The Pacific and Southeast Asia have two major telecom hubs: Tokyo and Singapore. Tokyo's status reflects its importance as the capital of one of Asia's largest economies with huge trade and financial flows with the United States as well as a defense treaty. Tokyo dominates Japan like Paris does France. Singapore's emergence reflects Hong Kong's downfall due to the Chinese government's failure to honor its commitment to HK autonomy. China requires any political candidate for HK office to be approved by it. Hence every HK politician is de facto a Beijing puppet. Secondly, China's security laws allow the arrest of anyone criticizing the Chinese government. The collapse of HK's rule of law is illustrated by numerous arrests of anyone peacefully opposing the government. You can go to jail for wearing a T-shirt advocating HK independence. In contrast, Singapore is neutral in the geopolitical war between the US and China and its judges are independen...

The American tech giant is deploying a high capacity cable directly linking Thailand to Christmas Island, which in turn will be connected by two diverse cables to Australia. The new route is unusual as it goes around Indonesia to reach Thailand's slender West Coast leg as opposed to threading the Sundra Stait and traversing the very busy waters off Singapore and up the Bay of Thailand. I told an international development bank a few weeks ago that it would make sense to do such a landing in order to avoid the crowded and congested Thailand Bay. My idea was to link India's East Coast to Thailand via its slender Southern leg. It is always a good idea to avoid routes that are already heavily used by subsea cables to improve resiliency. In this case, it also avoids ship-infested waters that pose a high risk of subsea cable damage. This new project makes two things very clear. Google's subsea cable guys are looking to reduce their network's reliance on Singapore, which is th...

A good Tech Capital article on the new wave of American Tech Giant cables in Asia:  https://thetechcapital.com/subsea-shake-up-how-new-cables-are-wiring-southeast-asias-ai-era/. My list of the most important new cables: 1. Apricot is a 12 fibre pair Southeast Asian cable with throughput of 290 Terabits. It bypasses China, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea in a clear signal to the Chinese government to get lost. Google and META are consortium members. 2. Echo is a 12 fibre pair Pacific cable directly linking Singapore to the United States. It has 144 Tbps throughput. Google and Facebook are equal partners in the project. The lower throughput reflects the 20,000 kilometer length of the cable. Same holds true for Bifrost. 3. Bifrost is the sister cable linking Singapore to the US. Its digital horse power is 180 Tbps. 4. Waterworth is a 480 Tbps behemoth with 24 fibre pairs. We still don't know the exact landing points in Asia. It will land on both the West and East coasts ...

GNC is Guam's main carrier neutral data center. It doubles as a cable landing station. Usable colo space is 650 square meters. It has access to 2 megawatts. Guam's main energy source is diesel. A couple cables house their network equipment at the facility, including the Japan-Guam-Australia North and South networks (Google). The main problem for carriers considering Guam is that the PTT controls metro connectivity between the cable landing stations and data centers. The incumbent TeleGuam is a problem because it charges 10 to 20 times the kilometer rate as in developed Western cities like Amsterdam. A 100G metro wave ranges from $5K to $8K per month. That is more than 20% the cost of 100G waves from Singapore to Guam. One can get a dark fibre pair between Amsterdam data centres for 300 to 400 Euros a month. Guam offers the Pacific something it badly needs, a third telecom hub. Not an important place for peering, but ...

As most of you know, Google is building a subsea cable ring between Christmas Island and Australia. I speculated last week that Christmas Island might be where the planned South Africa to Australia Umoja cable would land. It turns out that the new cable, Dhivaru, will connect the new rising Middle East subsea cable hub of Oman to Christmas Island with a stop in the Maldives. The term 'dhivaru' refers to the rope used to control the sail on traditional Maldivian ships. So the Google plan is quite clear. Google is creating an Indian Ocean subsea cable ring connecting Africa to Australia via Umoja and the Middle East to Australia via Dhivaru and the Bosun cable linking Christmas Island to Darwin. I think that all these Google cables will be 16 or 24 fibre pairs pairs. Certainly not less than 16, but not exceeding 24, as traffic cannot justify it. At first glance there are losers and scorned parties. None of these cables land in India, which might reflect India's subsea cable r...

Tabua is part of Google's grand Pacific Initiative, a project to build a mesh-like web of subsea cables connecting Japan, the US, Australia, and many Pacific islands. The islands include Guam, Fiji, Hawaii, and French Polynesia. These islands play a crucial role: they provide power to keep throughput at higher levels than otherwise possible. Another key role for the islands is as telecom switching hubs with each cable landing station serving several high capacity cables.  Tabua is a standard 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable with two branches landing on the Australian and American sides. Design throughput is 17 Tbps per fibre pair. This dual branch approach has become popular because if the Queensland branch is damaged, traffic can be switched to the New Wales CLS with fibre linking the two cable landing stations. Similarly, on the US side, it lands in Hawaii and also Los Angeles. If the Hawaii/LA segment fails, then the traffic can be routed via other cables landin...

LS1/PAIX Accra; 100G; Three Years; $25K MRC. London/Lagos; 10G; Three Years; $10K MRC. 2Africa cross connect charges are limited to $150 per month and the cable's reliability will be much better than SAT-3, MainOne, WACS, and ACE. It is buried deeper with better designed back haul and avoids the Congo and the Le Trou Sans Fond canyons. Note the Red Sea segment from Egypt to Oman is incomplete. There is no schedule for its completion.

Zuckerberg should pull his head out of his ass. Yann LeCun's META departure underscores just how much Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted away from seeking AI innovation to chasing the latest fad, namely large language models like ChatGPT. Zuckerberg has a history of bad decisions. The stillborn Metaverse is just one example. Yann LeCun is one of the AI Godfathers. He used convolutional neural nets to greatly improve optical character recognition and computer vision. In contrast, large language models are an obvious dead end due to their creative writing tendencies and amoeba-like reasoning abilities (no offense, amoebas, you actaully excel ChatGPT). Fundamental breakthroughs are not achieved by scaling up digital parrots. Yann has repeatedly noted that the best AI models, the large language models, appear to be just regurgitation machines without any ability to reach new conclusions. They cannot identify or correct their own mistakes or realize that their approach is failing and adopt a n...

- 2Africa is much more expensive than Equiano. The 2Africa 100G pricing is $25K and above excluding tails for Lisbon to Lagos. In contrast, Equiano 100G pricing is below $20K now. Similarly, Equiano 10G pricing gravitates around $5K versus $10K on the same route for 2Africa.  The reason for this disparity is that the 144 Tbps Equiano cable primarily serves South Africa, Portugal, and Nigeria. In contrast, the 180 Tbps 2Africa network serves over 30 countries and Facebook kept 4 of the 16 pairs for itself. Note that the 2Africa map does not include the Pearls extension of 2Africa to the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, and Mumbai.  Another sign of the impending capacity crunch is the unwillingness of 2Africa consortium members to sell IRUs. An IRU is a long term capacity sale ranging typically dffrom 10 years to life of system. Carriers will not sell IRUs if they expect future capacity shortages or think they are likely. Many of these carriers have transit backbones that they must keep ...

Google's Bosun cable will connect Christmas Island, located in the East Indian Ocean, to Darwin, Australia, site of a large military base with rotating contingents of Japanese and American soldiers. The project was announced near the end of 2024. At the time it struck me as a bit strange. Google's new cables across the Pacific will do a lot of island hopping. This allows the power to be boosted, the islands can serve as traffic switching centers if they are hosting multiple cables, and complete OEO regeneration can be done. Voltage drops as electricity flows through the copper or aluminum current conductor. So the advantage of powering a cable at intermediate points is clear. It enables higher end-to-end transmission throughput. A key aspect of Google's Pacific projects is better resiliency. The easiest way to do that is a put a small prefabricated modular CLS on an island and land multiple cables there. There Layer 3 switching can divert traffic in case a ca...

A point: TY3. Z point: 2905 Diehl Road, Aurora Illinois. Service: 10G Wave (Layer 1). Subsea Cable: Topaz. MRC: $11,999. NRC: $1250. Term: 1 Year.

Most financial traders rely on the PC-1 or Topaz subsea cables to move market data and orders between the Japanese Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But all subsea cables eventually experience outages. Highly diverse, yet low latency protect path using new Juno network. Layer 10G pricing is great. A-end address: Tokyo Equinix TY3 Z-end address: CME Aurora data centre. Bandwidth: Linear 10G (unprotected). RTD: 122ms or lower. 12M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 8,000 24M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 7,800 36M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 7,650

1. ASE; 100G Wave; Tokyo/Singapore; $19K MRC; 2 Years. 2. AAE1; 10G Wave; Marseille/Singapore; $3,500 MRC; 3 Years. 3. Juno; 100G Wave; Tokyo/LA; $16,461 MRC; 3 Years. 4. ADC; 100G Wave; HK/Singapore; $12.3K MRC; 3 Years. 5. Faster; 100G Wave; TY2/Coresite LA; $18.2k MRC; 3 Years.

 Capacity: 100G (PEACE) A-End: Mombasa B-End: Marseilles Term: 24 Month MRC: $40,500 NRC: $ 15,000

Author: Dmitry Kovsh. Subcom employee. Presentation Available Upon Request. In his presentation Dmitry focused on designing wet plant for open cable systems. Wet plant is everything in the water up to the beach manhole. The main components are the fibre optic cable and optical amplifiers. I define an open cable system as one where capacity owners manage individually their capacity. This business model involves capacity allocation by fibre pair or a percentage of a fibre pair's spectrum. Big capacity owners own one or more fibre pairs. Smaller players own spectrum called either a quarter fibre pair or half fibre pair. As the name suggests, a quarter fibre pair means the owner has exclusive right to use 25% of the fibre pair's usable spectrum. Similarly for a half fibre pair. Spectrum ownership means the cable delivers usable spectrum on a fibre pair defined by upper and lower frequency limits. The spectrum lying in the frequency range belongs to the owner for the te...

The eight fibre pair ADC system went live in November of last year. Its design capacity is slightly above 160 Tbps. Consortium members and large capacity owners include China Telecom, China Unicom, PLDT (the Philippine incumbent), Singtel, Softbank, TATA, and Vietel. TATA owns a fibre pair marketed under its own brand, TGN-IA2. NEC built the Asia Direct Cable. ADC 100G pricing for the Singapore to Tokyo route varies from $13.5K to $18.5K MRC on three year contracts. If you wish to avoid Chinese carriers, yet enjoy competitive pricing, TATA is a good choice. By a Chinese carrier I mean a network licensed to operate in mainland China and hence subject to its national security laws. These laws dictate that Chinese operators must cooperate with Chinese national security agencies. That's a big problem. In contrast, as just one example, Apple refused to cooperate with the FBI on unlocking a phone in an investigation. So there is a clear difference between China and the Wes...

The 24 fibre pair repeatered cable links Genoa, Rome, Sardinia, and Sicily. It is very high capacity. Each fibre pair can transmit slightly in excess of 26 terabits per second for a grand total of over 624 Tbps. This is likely the highest transmission rate of any repeatered subsea cable to date. Uniterreno is constructing a Rome data center to which the cable will be connected. Unidata is the name of the data center division.  The cable illustrates a number of subsea communication trends. The 24 fibre pair count has become the de facto standard. When I worked at Hibernia Atlantic between 2005 and 2011, cables never exceeded 8 pairs. That was the technical and economic ceiling. In contrast, Facebook's Waterworth, Uniterreno, Anjana, Candle, and Medusa are all 24 pair systems. So half petabit repeatered cables are the new normal. Uniterreno also illustrates a recent trend to build very high subsea capacity cables that serve a single nation. High capacity single nation cables are quit...

META has started selecting landing sites. As the map below shows, the subsea cable's routing is unique, a record breaking 50,000 kilometers in length, and it will form a ring around the world. A ring allows Facebook to reroute traffic in the opposite direction if there is a fault. Waterworth is a 24 fibre pair system. That puts at the top of the fiber pair count for spatial division multiplexing systems. So figure a design transmission rate of a half petabit per second.  Although crazy news outlets have reported it will cost $10 billion, that figure is absurd. The project can easily be done for $2 billion or less even with extensive terrestrial trenching to create new and unique fibre routes. Will the project use new technologies like multicore fibre or multiband spectrum? Doubtful. The price tag dictates the META subsea cable design team will use standard proven technology. No one wants to tell their boss they just wasted $1.5 billion dollars. It is not good for your career. 😃 Wa...

Option 1: London/South Africa/Singapore/Tokyo; 10G Wave; MRC: $21,840; 3 Year Deal; Cables include all-star lineup of Equiano, EASSY, AAE-1, & ADC. Option 2: London/Egypt/Saudi Arabia/Singapore/Tokyo; 10G Wave; MRC: $18,540; 3 Year Deal; Cables include all-star lineup of EUNetworks, Hawk, Ameer2, BBG, SJC.

Any so-called security expert should be aware that anchor dragging is a leading cause of subsea cable damage. There is no presumption of intent or sabotage. Anchors are light relative to large ships. So a ship can drag its anchor across the ocean without realizing it. Proper anchor storage requires three steps and poorly trained crews may skip one or two of these leading to the anchor falling back into the water. Attached is the ICPC article on anchor dragging: https://lnkd.in/dGzcSZst