Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

SEA-H2X: A Mystery Player Among Subsea Cables This cable is very under the radar. Very few industry insiders ever mention it. Yet, it is not an insignificant project. The main 8 fibre pair trunk directly connects Singapore and Hong Kong. It uses branching units to extend the cable to Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, and a free trade Chinese port city known as Hainan. Hauwei Marine built it with advanced branching units that include optical switching as well as flexible power distribution. The cable's design capacity is 180 Tbps. At 20 Tbps a pair, I suspect there is upside throughput potential.  Interestingly enough, it is an open cable system so each consortium member selects and buys their own submarine line termination gear which I assume includes the DWDM kit. This helps to some extent alleviate the concern that Chinese security agencies have compromised the system. But there are other ways of eavesdropping other than infiltrating the terminal gear even though that is the best

This new subsea cable perfectly illustrates how these undersea digital highways have become instruments of political power and foreign policy. The Chinese government is lending the Cambodian government the money required to build a subsea cable that China Uncom will operate for Cambodia and which Hauwei Marine will undoubtedly build. Since it goes to Hong Kong China will probably tap the cable and record the bits traversing it. Now encryption protects the data payload, but not the header routing information. So the IP addresses can be captured and much can be deduced from them. Unfortunately, few details are available regarding the new network. The Chinese government clearly wants to be able to monitor and capture the region's data flows so subsidizing cables to land in China and to be built by Hauwei is in their eyes is simply prudent national security policy.