Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

A total of 9 cables land on the beaches near the small town of Bude, UK. There are four operational cable landing stations serving them in the Bude, UK area: two Vodafone CLS, a Colt (former Lumen) CLS, and a BT facility. Please click on https://lnkd.in/gGAP3QMA for a plethora of photos of the cable landing stations. The map illustrates the tendency for telecommunications networks to lack adequate physical diversity to ensure resiliency. Sometimes a laissez faire regulation is not the right approach. Most back haul fibre from the cable landing stations to London probably traverses the single road parallel to the beaches. See below.  When I worked at Hibernia Atlantic as an exclusive sales contractor, we cited the concentration of cables at Highbridge and Bude as good reasons to purchase capacity on the Hibernia North & South cables. North lands several hundred kilometers above Cornwall and at Halifax on the North American side. It was a compelling sales ptich. These cables toda...

Colt has bought capacity on Vodafone's Apollo South cable, one of the first Trans-Atlantic cables to directly connect France to the United States (along with Flag Atlantic 1). Apollo was RFS 2003. I was surprised Colt would buy capacity on a 8 terabit cable that has already 22 years of service under its belt. Apollo is a low capacity system facing similar operating expenses to higher capacity systems, hence its pricing should be generally much higher. In general, Colt appears to be mostly interested in serving the low latency end of the financial markets, mostly market markers (providing a bid and ask for a financial asset) and financial traders. Hence the most plausible explanation is that Apollo South provides a low latency route connecting Paris and Frankfurt to the NYSE and NASDAQ data centers in New Jersey as well as the other financial markets like BATS located at NY4, Secaucus Equinix. Another possible angle might be that the cable is not only low latency, but also highly di...