Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Amazon Ireland has applied for a maritime usage license to land a planned cable connecting Ireland to the United States. It is considering landing the cable near Castlefreke on Ireland's Southeast Coast in County Cork along a stretch of beach called the Strand. Amazon has made no public announcement so far. Here is the filed application: https://lnkd.in/dUF__j8V. I discovered this when I came across a local Irish newspaper that mentioned that Amazon was looking at a nearby beach for a cable landing. I then did a Google search and found the filing. All these filings are posted online and they are 'leading indicators' as economists would say of what is going to happen.  No Trans-Atlantic subsea cables currently land on Ireland's South Coast other than EXA's Express and that is part of the reason that Amazon finds it so appealing. Such a cable would be physically diverse at least on the terrestrial side to the Irish Sea and older Atlantic cables like Hibernia North and...

Like Firmina Anjana uses the Myrtle Beach CLS (DC Blox is the owner) for its US landing and is an extremely high capacity spatial division multiplexing cable with 24 fibre pairs. Design throughput is 480 Tbps. It is also a hyperscaler cable, a Meta project. The European landing is at Santander, Spain with Telxius providing the CLS. The name Anjana is a mystery to me. I assumed it was a Spanish name, but Anjana is also an Asian Indian female name that means complete and worthy.  Notable features include ***Record holder for highest capacity Trans-Atlantic cable at a half petabit day one. Note this is design capacity. It will undoubtedly be upgraded to even higher levels down the road. How much depends on coherent optics progress. ***Uses aluminum to conduct power. This works better than copper because it is lighter weight and less expensive. By using a slightly greater diameter aluminum can maintain the same voltage draw down as copper. ***Meta is landing the cable itself in US wate...

Most Layer 1 bandwidth buyers focus their efforts on EXA's three Hibernia Atlantic cables, Aquacoms' AEC-1 and AEC-2 assets, and Marea and Dunant. As a group, those subsea networks probably account for 80% of wavelength transactions across the Pond. Two lesser well known alternatives are Amitié and Grace Hopper. Amitié means friendship in French. Not surprisingly, it connects Boston via a Lynn, Massachusetts landing at a Hibernia CLS to Bordeaux, France. This spatial division multiplexing 16 fibre pair main trunk cable is a Meta project. Meta owns 80% of the network capacity with the balance held by the minority partners of Orange, Vodafone, and Aquacoms. To be more precise, Amitié branches in the Eastern Atlantic to the UK and France. Twelve fibre pairs land at Bude, Cornwall, and sixteen pairs at the Orange La Porge CLS, a short distance from Bordeaux. Note that 16 pairs land in the US, but a total of 28 on the European side. The branching unit is using optical switching to ...

I n 2005 there were 7 high c apacity Trans- Atl antic subsea fibre optic networks connecting North  Americ a to Europe. Flag had two cables, Hibernia  Atl antic two as well, Level3 owned the Yellow cable, Global Crossing had  AC1, the PTTs owned TAT-14,  and  Apollo h ad two. In most cases the cables landed in either Ireland or the UK with most traffic destined for downtown London telecom hotels like the various partitions of Telehouse London (East & North at that time). London was Europe's key telecom hub. The other two important hubs were Frankfurt and  Amsterd am.  At the time Teli a Carrier was buying 10G waves 60 Hudson to Telehouse East for $38K a month. But that did not last long.  There was chronic excess capacity due to zombie subsea cables. In most industries if rates of return are depressed, firms exit the industry with their assets sold to be used in other sectors. Consequently, the in...

EXA has emerged as the dominant player on the Atlantic routes. Its original subsea network consisted of the the highly diverse North and South Hibernia cables complemented by the much faster and younger Express cable.  North EXA cable was RFS 2001. It connects London & New York via landings highly diverse to its competitors. North lands in Canada at Halifax and at Southport, UK. In contrast, most Atlantic cables land near New York City and in Cornwall near Bude. North's diversity makes it an excellent choice for network planners focusing on resiliency. Obviously, the cable's latency is high, but that is generally the tradeoff one must accept to achieve physical diversity. I think the RTD 60 Hudson/Telehouse London is probably 76 ms. dfs South EXA cable was also RFS 2001. It lands at the same CLS as North on both sides of the Atlantic. I believe the latency is slightly higher.  Express was built much later (RFS 2015). It is designed to be the lowest latency path f...