Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Most African cables traverse the Congo Canyon as opposed to detouring around it. The canyon is not particular deep, but it is huge in terms of floor coverage. Depth varies from 1400 to 1600 meters. Le Trou Sans Fond canyon off Abidjan drops 2300 meters where the canyon meets the continental shelf. It is perfect recipe for sediment and debris avalanches.  These canyons were created by strong river currents that carve the ocean bottom and also deposit sediment. Debris and sediment slides can easily crush the older African cables lying at the bottom. In contrast, both Equiano and 2Africa are routed around these danger spots. That increases latency, but reduces outages. Sometimes African ISPs are short sighted in this matter. They take WACS despite the exorbitant costs and high likelihood of extended down time because it is a bit faster.  An interesting question is how long will WACS be worth operating given the accumulated optical loss from one or two outages each year. The more ...

Details are limited, but carriers have been bidding on extending the Peace cable from Mombasa to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. I think the big drawback is the iron grip of Tanzania's state owned fibre optic network on connectivity. It has resulted in much higher Layer 1 and Layer 2 prices than in deregulated Kenya. This is a serious deterrent to investment. It means the local ISP and telecom ecosystem is small and may not be enough to sustain the minimum rate of return required to justify the project. The distance is small between Mombasa and Dar Es Salaam so I expect any cable to be unrepeatered.

Amazon's core network business is cloud services. These services generate less network traffic over long distances than Google's web search and advertising busiess. Customers download their data, compute, and then retrieve it or store it there. Amazon may back up its customer's data in another data center in the same cloud region, but traffic flows from cloud region to cloud region are probably low. As a result, Amazon has been a follower in subsea cables. Often a silent or minority investor like in the Bifrost where it is getting lit capacity in exchange for providing the US landing station. In some cases, Amazon is not a consortium member, but a fibre pair customer. Amazon bought a fibre pair IRU on the Marea, which connects Virginia Beach to Spain, from Telxius. It was probably their first physical capacity ownership on a subsea cable.  More recently, Amazon announced its first solar project, Fastnet, which connects Ireland, where it owns several large data centers, to M...

The two fibre pair Greenland Connect system links Greenland to Iceland and Canada's Newfoundland province. Photos of the cable landing stations below. The first photo is the Icelandic facility with the one below it being the Greenland counterpart. Greenland Connects lands South of Reykjavik and uses the same landing station as the DANICE cable. In Greenland it lands in Nuuk, the country's capital, and also in Qaqortoq. Although the cable began with 2x 10G waves in operation, it has been upgraded to 12.8 Tbps by Alcatel and Hauwei Marine.  Greenland Connect went live on March 23, 2009. It brought the first terrestrial Internet connectivity to Greenland and slashed RTDs to content delivery points by over 500 milliseconds. Up to that point Greenland had relied solely on geostationary satellites. I strongly believe that the Far North, which includes Siberia, Arctic Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and the Far Northern parts of the Nordic countries, will experience massive migration and ...