Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

An optical amplifier being lowered in the sea during a cable deployment. They are designed to work at depths as great as 10,000 meters where pressure equals a thousand and one earth atmospheres. Their design lifespan is 25 years and they rarely fail. Almost all subsea cable damage involves the fibre cable itself as opposed to the amplifiers. Besides immense pressure, the amplifiers must resist sea salt corrosion. To do so their hulls are generally comprised of titanium or high strength beryllium copper alloys. Titanium offers an exceptionally high strength to weight ratio as well as unmatched corrosion resistance at ocean depth pressure. Beryrillium copper dissipates heat extremely well. This is essential as the amplifiers contain many lasers and they generate significant heat.

Logos Space is a new LEO satellite provider that plans to put over four thousand LEO birds into seven orbital shells in the 870 to 920 kilometer span above the Earth. Logos is taking an unusual approach. Its target market includes businesses and governments, but excludes households. Instead of Internet, Logos offers highly secure Layer 2 MPLS Ethernet services. These are the core products, not transit. To improve security over traditional satellite services, it is operating in the high frequency V and E spectrum bands along with the lower frequency K band. This enables the use of narrow beams to connect the customer premise equipment to a satellite. These narrow beams are much more difficult to intercept for eavesdropping or jamming.  Most LEO constellations provide exclusively Layer 3 services. Satellite frequency spectrum is a finite, strictly limited resource. So overbooked or oversubscribed transit has been the only service that traditionally made economic sense. N...

The AFR-IX cable project has selected Nokia as their primary coherent optics vendor. Medusa will deploy the Nokia 1830 platform that supports coherent optics. Nokia's Infinera acquisition provides the ICE7 coherent optics. This equipment announcement illustrates how slowly the interesting Medusa project is moving. This project was announced in 2020. While it is smart to delay terminal gear purchases towards the end of the project, subsea cable projects have not historically taken upwards of six or seven years to finish. I can only speculate on the cause of these delays. The system has many landings in dysfunctional North African countries where governments are authoritarian, corrupt, incompetent or compromised by their ownership or control of PTTs. Cable ships are scarce. So booking them for the deployment may have been a big obstacle. I am disappointed that Medusa made the 'safe choice'. Big projects with lots of cash usually end up picking either Ciena or Infinera for the...