Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Bulk Infrastructure, the Nordic data center and transport player, wants to build a subsea cable linking Norway to Canada for an estimated $620 million. While I applaud Canada for standing up to Bully Trump, this project is fundamentally flawed 1. Most Canadian Internet traffic peers in the US at Secaucus Equinix or in Chicago. It does not go to Europe and the same holds for voice traffic. Most Canadian international calls are to the US. None of this should surprise anybody. Nearly 50% of Canadians live within 100 kilometers of the US border and the two countries are each other's other largest trading partners. Bulk's project has no firm economic foundation. I worked at Hibernia Atlantic for six years from 2005 to 2011, the only high capacity cable directly linking Canada to Europe. Canadian transport demand to Europe was tiny. European transport demand to Canadian destinations was almost non-existent. Internet traffic between the US and Canada is many magnitudes bigger than be...

This project is building a hybrid terrestrial-subsea network for Norway. The subsea portion is designed to link Norwegian cities on the West Coast. Building terrestrially between these cities is very expensive unless existing conduit is used. So the only cost effective approach to provide a route diverse to existing telecom rights of way is to go underwater. All Viking routes are 86 fibre pairs. The terrestrial routes connect not only the country's key telecom hotels, but also many of the major hyperscaler facilities as well as all of the cable landing stations. The Far North segment is for NATO and the Norwegian military. Norway shares a border with Mother Russia.  Viking's sales policy is to avoid the high overhead associated with lit services such as wavelengths. So only dark fibre will be leased or sold as IRUs. Dark fibre providers have very low operating costs. They can be run on a skelton crew. Fibre repair is always outsource to third parties. Simple devices can be inst...