Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

EXA now owns the Aqua Comms assets. These include fibre pairs on AEC-1, AEC-2, and Amitié. EXA also acquired two Irish Sea cables as part of the purchase. EXA managment emphasizes customer choice in their justification of the deal, but I think what makes it a good deal for EXA is the price. It picked up lots of fibre pairs for a total price of around $40 million. Now subsea fibre IRU purchases often range from $30 million to $60 million per pair on life of system term deals. So this is a great distressed purchase. In the same ballpark as Columbia Venture's purchase of the 360 Networks for $25 million, which was rebranded as Hibernia Atlantic. I think the main question I would pose to EXA's operational staff is whether they can generate cost savings. Operational synergies are important to judging the success of an acquisition. This is where companies often fail in their consolidation efforts. GTT went bankrupt in 2021 after rapidly buying lots of network assets i...

EXA has emerged as the dominant player on the Atlantic routes. Its original subsea network consisted of the the highly diverse North and South Hibernia cables complemented by the much faster and younger Express cable.  North EXA cable was RFS 2001. It connects London & New York via landings highly diverse to its competitors. North lands in Canada at Halifax and at Southport, UK. In contrast, most Atlantic cables land near New York City and in Cornwall near Bude. North's diversity makes it an excellent choice for network planners focusing on resiliency. Obviously, the cable's latency is high, but that is generally the tradeoff one must accept to achieve physical diversity. I think the RTD 60 Hudson/Telehouse London is probably 76 ms. dfs South EXA cable was also RFS 2001. It lands at the same CLS as North on both sides of the Atlantic. I believe the latency is slightly higher.  Express was built much later (RFS 2015). It is designed to be the lowest latency path f...

The Atlantic at the 100G level ranges from $4K to $6K MRC. The cables deployed at or around the time of the New Millenium vary from $3,800 to $5K. Generally, new cables like Marea and Dunant command a premium because they directly connect Ashburn Equinix to Continental Euroipe with both Ashburn Equinix and at least two Paris Equinix facilities onünet. Both bypass Ireland and the British isles. So expect to pay in the $5K to $6K range on 2 or 3 year terms. And yes, you should pay the premium because Marea, Dunant, Anjana, and Nuveem all dramatically improve resiliency. The NYC/London cooridor is congested with most UK landings in Cornwall at Bude. Furthermore, UK surveillance of undersea cables is well known.  Any saavy buyer should be riding both NYC/London cables and also cables like Dunant and Marea that directly link Ashburn Equinix to the European continent. This physical diversity is not a luxury; it's essential. A special mention goes to EXA Express for NYC/London which is a ...

Technology: Spatial division multiplexing.  Fibre Pairs: 12.  Founding Father: Google Consortium Members: Google & Orange. The French PTT is best described as a junior partner.  RFS: January, 2021.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Paris. Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Saint-Hillaire-de-Riez.  Notable Features: Second cable after Marea to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Dunant was first subsea network  in the world to deploy spatial division multiplexing and and achieve a two digit fibre pair count.  Dunant was the beginning of the spatial division multiplexing revolution. It was the first cable to leapfrog from the standard 4 to 8 fibre pair coherent optics paradigm for the Atlantic to the 12 to 32 pair spatial division multiplexing model that dominates today. Dunant went live January 19, 2021 with 12 fibre pairs and lit capacity of 250 terabits per second. However, the design capacity was even higher, 300 Tbps. The cable is named after t...