Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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...

This past autumn I did a post based on two insider conversations about an under-the-radar Facebook cable that would span the world with a W shape. I was told the cable would directly dconnect the US to South Africa and then head straight to India and onward to Australia before landing on the West Coast of the US. My theory at the time was that this was an AI driven project since the routing really didn't match Internet traffic flows or did not connect to major Internet exchange points (like Singapore) even though the route passes by them. The purported route latencies would be quite high which discourages carrier interest in purchasing capacity on the system.  So I figured its purpose was to move 'Big Data'. I am surprised to say I was right.  The one deviation from my initial understanding is that the 24 fibre pair cable will land in Brazil before veering for South Africa. A Brazil landing makes perfect sense in retrospect because Facebook's current capacity down to So...