Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Bulk Infrastructure, the Nordic data center and transport player, wants to build a subsea cable linking Norway to Canada for an estimated $620 million. While I applaud Canada for standing up to Bully Trump, this project is fundamentally flawed 1. Most Canadian Internet traffic peers in the US at Secaucus Equinix or in Chicago. It does not go to Europe and the same holds for voice traffic. Most Canadian international calls are to the US. None of this should surprise anybody. Nearly 50% of Canadians live within 100 kilometers of the US border and the two countries are each other's other largest trading partners. Bulk's project has no firm economic foundation. I worked at Hibernia Atlantic for six years from 2005 to 2011, the only high capacity cable directly linking Canada to Europe. Canadian transport demand to Europe was tiny. European transport demand to Canadian destinations was almost non-existent. Internet traffic between the US and Canada is many magnitudes bigger than be...

The two fibre pair Greenland Connect system links Greenland to Iceland and Canada's Newfoundland province. Photos of the cable landing stations below. The first photo is the Icelandic facility with the one below it being the Greenland counterpart. Greenland Connects lands South of Reykjavik and uses the same landing station as the DANICE cable. In Greenland it lands in Nuuk, the country's capital, and also in Qaqortoq. Although the cable began with 2x 10G waves in operation, it has been upgraded to 12.8 Tbps by Alcatel and Hauwei Marine.  Greenland Connect went live on March 23, 2009. It brought the first terrestrial Internet connectivity to Greenland and slashed RTDs to content delivery points by over 500 milliseconds. Up to that point Greenland had relied solely on geostationary satellites. I strongly believe that the Far North, which includes Siberia, Arctic Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and the Far Northern parts of the Nordic countries, will experience massive migration and ...