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...

I joined AT&T in 1992 and did statistical forecasting of industry aggregates like voice traffic measured in minutes of use. That experience informed my view that big companies are necessary evils - necessary in that network economies of scale are real, but evil in the sense that governance by consensus results in mediocrity. I eventually ended up doing Layer 1 capcity sales agency work for Tyco Submarine's own network which was eventually sold to Tata Communications. Under Eric Gutshall's tutelage I learned the fundamental of sales including 'quick and accurate quotes' and never losing on price unless the rate of return was too low. Later I worked for him at Hibernia Atlantic whose network is depicted below. Today these five cables are part of EXA Infrastructure and really their crown jewels.  I am not a reseller. If you accept a network capacity proposal, your contract and service is with the underlying network operator who typically owns fibre or IRUs on fibre or ...