Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

 I am heading to Nairobi for ITW Africa. I will also use Nairobi as my base for visiting different African nations. Available to meet with anyone in Nigeria, South Africa, Dubai, India, and Singapore who has mutual interests in subsea cables, procurement, and network capacity sourcing. 

MRC: $19,200. Term: 2 Years. Lisbon/London backhaul route protected. 

Facebook's subsea cable subsidary, Edge Cable Holdings, has petitioned the FCC to land a new cable at the NJIX data center in Wall Township, New Jersey. The cable lands in Europe at an Arelion owned facility in Blaabjerg, Denmark. META uses both NJIX and the Arelion facility for the power feed equipment, but is installing the submarine line termination equipment, which includes the lasers and electronics at a Piscataway carrier neutral data center and its Danish counterpart, an unnamed Esbjerg site. There are two huge data centers in Esbjerg. Facebook currently owns two fiber pairs on the consortium AEC-2 subset network linking the US and Denmark. AEC-2 has exactly the same end points as Aurora. Hyperscaler traffic has grown so rapidly that consortium membership in many cases simply makes no economic sense. Most hyperscalers need all the capacity that a cable provides and hence sole ownership as emerged as the most economic business model. We know very little about A...

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.

I don't see any compelling reason for totally excluding Chinese Layer 1 capacity from your network. Data should be Layer 3 encrypted in any case and most DWDM box manufacturers such as Ciena offer Layer 1 encryption. The SEA-H2X fibre optic subsea cable went live in May. It offers 200 Tbps throughput on several key routes such as Thailand/Singapore, HK/Singapore, and Malaysia/Singapore. Moreover, it is an open cable system. This means each fibre pair owner selects their submarine line termination equipment. So you might even find a non-Chinese carrier on the system who purchased spectrum or fibre pairs. SEA-H2X is a 8 fibre pair cable whose main trunk connects Singapore to two Chinese landings. Hauwei was the system integrator with China Mobile, China Unicom, and Converge as consortium members. Converge is a large Philippine fibre-to-the-home provider with 2 million subscribers.

Asia United Group East (AUG East) cable's main trunk links Tokyo and Singapore with branches to South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and possibly Indonesia (the consortium has stated the cable will land in Indonesia, but the map below shows Indonesia is off-net). Few project details are available. Fibre pair count is unknown, but it will be at least 16 and likely as much as 24 fibre pairs given the region's incredible Layer 3 traffic growth. Consortium members include Microsoft, Amazon, Singtel, the Japanese long haul carrier ARTERIA, Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan PTT), DREAMLINE (Korean competitive carrier), GLOBE Telecom, and Unified National Networks (Brunei). Like Candle, it avoids the South China Sea by hugging its perimeter in order to avoid Chinese permitting (China claims the South China Sea as territorial waters and requires Chinese government permits for all subsea cables laid in it) and put distance between itself and the large number of cables packed toget...

Candle is one of the more interesting Intra-Asian cables to go live over the next several years. It is the first 24 fibre pair system to serve this region. Total transmission capacity is 570 Tbps. This makes it one of the highest capacity cables on the planet. Like Apricot, Candle avoids the South China Sea due to Beijing's territorial claims and permitting demands. The main trunk links the inseparable couple of Tokyo and Singapore with branches into the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Consortium leaders include META, Softbank, and Telekom Malaysia. This project, like Apricot, exemplifies the geopolitics of American-Chinese rivalry. Hyperscalers avoid China and HK and exchange traffic at neutral Singapore. However, the routing is shorter than Apricot because Candle is deployed at the edge of the South China Sea as opposed to a long detour around Indonesia and up the East Coast of the Philippines. Like Apricot, Candle offers physical diversity to the usual suspects mak...

The Echo cable is a 12 fibre network directly linking Singapore to California with with a Guam branching unit. Bifrost, the other cable connecting Singapore and the US, also lands in Bifrost. I believe each cable effectively serves as backup for the other because traffic can be rerouted at Guam. Both cables are only 12 fibre pairs due to the great distances involved. Its design capacity is 260 Tbps. A key feature of both Bifrost and Echo is they bypass the South China Sea even though it is part of the shortest path between Singapore and the US West Coast. Hence Chinese permits are avoided, resiliency is improved since most Intra-Asian traffic traverses the South China Sea, and the cable is more protected from Chinese tapping or attack. However, it does come as a price. The cable must be buried quite deep through the shallow Indonesian waters to minimize fishing boat or anchor damage. And Indonesia is quite slow to issue permits for new subsea cables. So two cables likely...

JAKO is a high capacity cable connecting Korea and Japan via a Busan, Korea, and a Fukuoka, Japan landing. Busan is a major Korean cable landing spot. Nine cables including JAKO land in Busan. The cable's consortium consists of Microsoft, Amazon, Arteria (important Japanese back haul carrier), and the Korean Dreamline company. Dreamline is a Korean carrier that provides tower services, metro and long haul connectivity. It is increasingly common for hyperscalers to team up with competitive carriers in Asia because the regional PTTs are viewed as difficult, slow to make decisions, and too concerned about protecting their home turf. Uncooperative is hyperscaler diplomatic language to describe the telecom incumbents. NTT is an exception to this generalization. Obviously this cable reflects Microsoft and Amazon's cloud and AI ambitions. No public information is available on the number of fibre pairs. Given the fixed costs associated with cable deployment and rapidly growing traffic,...

Although most subsea cables with Singapore POPs land at Singapore, some do not, and these exceptions are the keys to better uptime for your Layer 1 network. Five fibre pair AAE1 lands at a Penang, Malaysia CLS that has a fully diverse fibre ring for automatic route protection into Singapore. Each side of the fibre ring uses a separate bridge to cross the Malaysian/Singapore border. One side of the ring terminates at the older of the two Global Switch data centers and the other at SG3. So AAE1 neither lands at Singapore nor uses any of the Singapore cable landing stations. This is one reason why AAE1 is a 'must' for network capacity buyers. Other reasons include low latency for the Marseille/Singapore end points and relatively good pricing due to the system's high capacity. Bay of Bengal Gateway also lands in Penang, Malaysia, but my understanding is that it and AAE1 use different cable landing stations. However, I have not seen backhaul maps so I cannot clai...

NTT and Mitsui Leasing have teamed up together with fibre optic cable manufacturer Sumitomo Corporation to fund a 16 fibre pair subsea cable costing $500 million. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the second project on which NTT Data and Mitsui Leasing have cooperated. The high capacity 20 fibre pair Juno cable was the first project. It is unusual to see a large incumbent player like NTT undertaking a subsea cable project with a non-telecom company as co-owner. But the advantages are clear. Mitsui will contribute cash, but not play a major role in design, vendor selection or wholesale commercials. So it not only reduces NTT's risk by sharing funding requirements, but it gives NTT a free hand in decision making. One lesson that has become perfectly clear is that large carrier consortiums increase the likelihood of deployment delays and lengthen the entire planning cycle because decisions require consensus. Moreover, the consensus requirement makes it difficult for new approaches...

A turbidity current is the likely culprit for the WACS trunk outage. The same holds true for the 2Africa Ivory Coast branch failure. The Taiwan earthquake of December 2006 is instructive in this regard. The 22 knocked out cables failed in sequence over the course of several hours. So the sheer force of the earthquake was not responsible. Instead, the seismic event caused sediment to begin moving down the undersea slope of Taiwan's continental shelf. This was not a gentle slope, but rather the steep sides of the Kaoping subsea canyon, which is 4 kilometers deep. As the chart shows, cables went dark in sequence radiating from the epicenter outward as this undersea tidal wave traveled down the sides of the subsea canyon. The turbidity current traveled at speeds ranging from 3.7 meters per second to 5.7 meters (roughly 20 kilometers per hour). The sequence of events suggests there were at least 2 and probably turbidity currents involved.  It is probably not a coincidence ...

Bevan Slattery likes to build things. His latest project, scheduled for a 2028 RFS, is the16 fibre pair APX-EAST cable linking Australia to the US. Bevan is Subco's CEO, one of the few successful private cable sea builders and operators. Previous projects include the OMAN to Australia system. The US Pentagon was the anchor tenant on that cable. Subco is a consortium member of the relatively low capacity, but important Indigo West cable linking Singapore to Perth and Sydney.  APX-EAST is designed to be fully powered by either end point. This is a resilience feature that should appeal to hyperscalers looking to take capacity on the system. I believe Google's Firmina also can be fully powered from either end point as well. Might not be a coincidence.  But the most striking feature is the lack of optical regeneration. Let's be clear. This cable is repeatered. It will use optical amplifiers like all other repeatered systems. Optical regeneration in this context means landing the...

A couple years ago BTG Pactual Infrastructure Fund II purchased the subsea operator, GlobeNet, as well as a South American fibre optics backbone company, OI, and combined those assets with a couple of data centers. Globenet's main asset, its cable linking New Jersey to Sao Paulo, is near end of life. But its cable landing stations face no such expiration date. Moreover, the Fortaleza CLS is a well known peering point with a lot of customers. BTG put all the telecom assets in a telecom infrastructure subsidiary known as V.TAL. At PTC in Hawaii V.TAL announced its plan for a 16 fibre pair, 320 Tbps subsea cable that will link the Sao Paulo Equinix data centers to Secaucus Equinix and probably also the NASDAQ and NYSE data centers in Carteret and Mahwah, New Jersey. The Globenet assets will accelerate the project because Synapse will use its cable landing stations in Tuckerton and Fortaleza as well as some of the existing US back haul fibre. The OI backbone, purchased f...

The private equity firm Cerberus has taken a majority equity stake in Datawave Networks, a Cyprus-based subsea cable developer. Datawave's key project is to deploy a linear 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable linking UAE, Oman, Mumbai, Chennai, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Datawave began this project in 2019 when the company was incorporated. But due to the increasing dominance of American Tech Giants, investors have been reluctant to fund private wholesale network operators. It is simply seen as too risky given lack of hyperscaler demand for leased subsea network capacity. Due to the Cerberus acquisition, SING is now fully funded with Subcom expected to complete the project in 2030. I believe part of what drove Cerberus' interest in this project was the Red Sea bottleneck. While building Marseille to Singapore would be viewed as too risky given the required capital, linking the new subsea cable hub of Oman to Singapore seems like a...

This project excites many powerful groups in Europe. Scientists want to equip the cable with sensors to study the Arctic Ocean while the EU wants to strengthen its influence on the Far North and also create a unique, low latency communication link with Asia that bypasses North America. It is in large part about infrastructure sovereignty. The benefits are quite clear. Indeed, they are at first glance compelling. Right now the EU has given a few million Euros to a consortium of carriers and educational networks to design it and perhaps conduct the geophysical survey. Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated. Indeed, the project has two Achilles Heels. A single cable is likely to be down a good deal of the time. That is the track record of Arctic cables: outages take in many cases 4 to 9 months to fix. So it is necessary to build a ring, which means two diverse subsea cables. So the total project cost doubles. But that is just the beginning of the challenge. Most cable ships cannot...

Both Indigo West and SJC are experiencing outages. I suggest trying ADC as non-Chinese capacity is available on favorable terms for three year contracts. TATA and TELIN are good choices. I can help with either of them. For Chinese capacity, I believe China Unicom has some very aggressive deals as well. Contact Omer Tariq in London or Georgio Garguillo in Milano.  SJC went live in 2013. Its design capacity is 28 Tbps and the cable has six fibre pairs. It connects mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, and Thailand. Both Sub.com and NEC built the system. The SJC consortium is large and includes China Telecom, China Mobile International, KDDI, Taiwan PTT, Singtel, TOT, Google, and a subsidiary of the Brunei PTT. 

In the late 90s Tyco Electronics (TE) purchased AT&T's subsea cable laying division. Stock prices of new fibre optic networks were soaring and priced at multiples similar to American Tech Giants today. So TE built a global subsea network, Tyco Global Network (TGN), to sell wholesale capacity. By the time it was completed in 2003, bandwidth pricing had collapsed. It was clear that the billions spent on TGN would never be recouped. By 2005, TATA, then known as VSNL, scooped it up for $130 million in one of the great contrarian investments in the telecom industry (Hibernia Atlantic's purchase in 2001 is another example). TATA got a lot. It included two Atlantic cables structured as a ring, dual cables linking India to Marseille and to Singapore plus a number of Pacific cables. TGN Pacific was one of those distressed assets. TGN Pacific was designed like most cables of that era to be self healing. Today most customers provide their own route protection via routers or switches....

A point: Most Tokyo Equinix sites. Also CC1 & Osaka Equinix. Z point: San Jose Equinix, LA Coresite 2. Service: 10G Wave. Layer 1. Term: 2 years. MRC: $5250. NRC: $2500. Customer responsible for cross connects. Cable: Juno. Remarks: Diverse back haul to both LA & San Jose. A point: TY5. Z point: Secaucus Equinix. Service: 10G wave. Layer 1. Term: 3 Years Latency: 163 ms RTD. MRC: $8500. Customer responsible for cross connects. Cable: No outages in the last two years. Note: Ideal for financial trading.

Singtel is leading a consortium of Asian carriers and American tech giants that will finance a new intra-asian cable connecting Japan, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea. Details are sparse. Press releases say it will be a high fibre count network. My guess is at least 12 pairs and as much as 24. Two core fibre is also a possibility given NEC's participation. What is striking is that SJC2 and ADC just went in service with Apricot also expected to be RFS this year, yet here is another cable with a similar Southeast Asian footprint under development. This suggests to me that traffic is growing faster than anticipated with the carriers under pressure to catch up to the rapidly growing market. The other notable feature is the absence of any landings in Hong Kong or mainland China. Since China has emerged as the regional bully, the cable's name is probably not a coincidence. Consortium members include Singtel, Amazon, Micro...