Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Blue Origin is a Jeff Bezos' startup providing space services to NASA and other clients. Those services include cargo delivery, rocket engines, lunar landing vehicles, and under development, a commercial space station. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket carries as much cargo as SpaceX' Starship and successfully launched a NASA probe in late 2025. The first stage is reusable.  New Glenn's success has encouraged Blue Origin to develop new satellite constellations. The company announced yesterday a hybrid network of 5,280 LEO and 128 MEO satellites called Terawave that will use dual free space lasers and radio frequencies to communicate with the Earth. Radio frequency will provide a minimum committed bit rate of 144 Gibabits per second, many magnitudes greater than what Starlink offers, with free space lasers boosting the throughput by 6 terabits in ideal weather conditions. Dual connectivity is not a new idea. Low latency financial trading platforms have been using microwave ...

The LEO satellite business model is one of the most interesting topics in telecommunications today. LEO satellites are not a 'new technology'. It is really just a new approach to providing Internet access without any intellectual or patent moat to prevent the entry of new competitors. There could be a know how moat, but the number of LEO satellite networks entering the market over the next 5 year suggests it is very shallow. LEO satellites provide Last Mile access using low Earth orbits ranging from 300 kilometers (180 US miles) to 2,000 kilometers (1200 miles). Each bird as they are affectionately called in the industry takes only 90 to 120 minutes to complete an orbit. Their orbits can take a variety of shapes. For example, a LEO orbit could be elliptical in order to achieve a closer approach to the Earth at some points along the path for more detailed image or data collection. Or the LEO could fly longitudinally from North Pole to South Pole and back again. Hence LEO satelli...

 Amazon announced yesterday it is launching its Kuiper constellation service in 2025. The UK will be the first country to go live. Up to now Starlink, which has 4.6 million customers, has faced no competition. But the huge buzz around Starlink is not really warranted. Yes, it is a great technical achievement particularly given that a customer is being handed off from one service satellite to another approximately every 30 minutes. However, what ultimately matters are financial results. Undoubtedly, Starlink is bleeding lots of cash. There is no way one can build a massive network prior to significant sales and avoid it. Satellites cannot be upgraded. So they must be fully loaded from day one which sharply increases the capex. Furthermore, the key metrics determining profitability and net cash flow are unknown. These metrics include customer acquisition costs. The American CLECs mostly went under during the dotcom era because it cost too much to acquire customers. Starlink has also...

Satellite competes with terrestrial broadband because they are both access technologies. But all satellite networks generate traffic for the terrestrial backbones including the subsea cables. After all, there is little content stored in space! 😃 Hence satellite Internet providers must access data centers just like every other technology in the telecom world. Inter-satellite free space laser communication will bypass the terrestrial backbones to an extent, but this is really just a drop in the bucket. It works mostly for low bandwidth applications like email and instant messaging.  The graph shows the number of objects launched into low earth orbit from 1960 onward. This includes manned space craft, satellites, and unmanned spacecraft. Note that the dominant factor is SpaceX putting Starlink LEO satellites into orbit. As of January 2025, Starlink has 6,932 in space. In addition, Amazon Kuiper is deploying 3,236 LEO birds with the bulk of the fleet flying into orbit in 2025 and 2026...

EU Gives Old Boys Club European Consortium 6 Billion Euros for LEO Every major world power bloc wants its own LEO satellite constellation. The EU is no exception. It has agreed to give a European consortium consisting of SES, Eutelsat, and Hipasat, 6 billion Euros to develop and deploy by 2030 a total of 290 LEO and MEO satellites. Obviously the EU wants the security and privacy of a homegrown communication system to be called IRIS that could back up terrestrial and subsea cables. I understand the impulse. The Europeans face an aggressive Russia and a surveillance happy US government with a President who is more comfortable with dictators than the democratically elected.  At the same time it is clear that there will be glut of low lying satellite capacity in the near future. Starlink has obviously a huge lead over the European project. In addition, marketing juggernaut Amazon began deployment in early 2024 of its 3,236 satellite system. Customer acquisition costs often determine th...