Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Bad news and also mildly bad news. AAE1 is down due to a fault in the Red Sea located between the Zafrana, Egypt and Saudi branching units. The outage began December 31st. Pearls 2Africa (depicted in the map) will go live near year's end, but it has only one fibre pair down the African East Coast from Oman to Kenya. China Mobile owns it.  The Big Picture is that the subsea cable world is facing a tough year. Right now Peace is the only high capacity cable live connecting Marseille to Singapore via the Red Sea. AAE1 is down. 2Africa, SWM6, Blue-Raman, and probably IEX cannot be completed due to the threat of Red Sea missile strikes. We can only hope that diplomacy results in safe passage for the cable ships. Otherwise persistent capacity shortages will only grow worse. I do expect AAE1 to be repaired within eight weeks as a cable ship can bypass Yemen via the Suez cable. But beware most cable ships are deploying new cables like Blue and Medusa. My guess is that the Indian owned cabl...

Venture capitalists have a poor infrastructure investment record. Their senior management typically has no startup telecom experience complemented by naive ideas that surging Internet traffic guarantees price stability. In addition, they have little idea of the operational challenge of creating a lean, mean sales machine that includes great customer experience and network performance. A really good company requires really good people. Digital 9's liquidation of its telecom infrastructure portfolio highlights a host of key issues. The portfolio includes the ailing Aquacomms cable network which Digital 9 is shopping. I speculate EXA will buy it as part of a wise strategy to consolidate the wholesale Trans-Atlantic market into a two carrier EXA/Telxius duopoly. Aquacomms was an attempt to double down on the Atlantic and Irish Sea routes despite glaring overcapacity that caused NYC/London 10Gs to fall from $38K in 2005 to $850-$1300 today. Yes, optical technology improved dramatically ...

Seacom went live two days ago and EIG is now being repaired. The repairs revealed that an anchor damaged the cables and hence vindicate my theory that the Rubymar was responsible. Bloomberg quoted me on this issue shortly after the outages started The Houthis hit this ship with a missile and it dropped anchor so the crew could evacuate in life boats. It then drifted over 20 kilometers scrapping the sea floor with its huge anchor which probably weighs five to ten tons. Although Red Sea cables are usually buried, the sea floor is generally soft silt and a heavy anchor will simply sink through the silt and then plow it as the ship drifts. In general, most subsea outages around the world happen on the shallow continental shelf. That means shallow coastal waters where ships damage them via fishing or anchor dropping. Ships drop anchor to achieve a full stop, to stabilize it in transit during bad weather or steady it during an evacuation like the Rubymar.  The real question surrounding ...