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...

Like Firmina Anjana uses the Myrtle Beach CLS (DC Blox is the owner) for its US landing and is an extremely high capacity spatial division multiplexing cable with 24 fibre pairs. Design throughput is 480 Tbps. It is also a hyperscaler cable, a Meta project. The European landing is at Santander, Spain with Telxius providing the CLS. The name Anjana is a mystery to me. I assumed it was a Spanish name, but Anjana is also an Asian Indian female name that means complete and worthy.  Notable features include ***Record holder for highest capacity Trans-Atlantic cable at a half petabit day one. Note this is design capacity. It will undoubtedly be upgraded to even higher levels down the road. How much depends on coherent optics progress. ***Uses aluminum to conduct power. This works better than copper because it is lighter weight and less expensive. By using a slightly greater diameter aluminum can maintain the same voltage draw down as copper. ***Meta is landing the cable itself in US wate...

BW Group purchased the Hawaiki cable in July, 2021 from the Hawaiki Submarine Cable Limited Partnership. The Partnership's original plan was to build a sister cable known as Hawaiki Nui (Great Hawaiki). BW, a Singapore company, has pursued this idea and finally signed earlier this year a Memorandum Of Understanding with TELIN, the international cable subsidiary of the Indonesian PTT. The MOU is really the partnership or consortium agreement and typically only happens once funding has been secured and all parties are fully onboard. The fact that Hawaiki Nui cable was announced in 2021 and just achieved the critical MOU milestone tells me that it has been very difficult to get this project off the ground. My speculation is that the cable's estimated cost is very high because it requires deep burial in the shallow waters of Indonesia; moreover, a very thorough and expensive marine survey is also necessary. Another challenge is that the cable's route requires Indonesi...