Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Google's Firmina is South America's first spatial division multiplexing cable. It is Google's third South American cable after Curie and Monet. Spatial division multiplexing maximizes total cable throughput by adding more fibre pairs as opposed to maximizing per pair throughput. The result is 12 to 32 pairs per cable versus 2 to 8 for conventional systems. A SDM cable will run each pair at 12 to 20 Tbps versus a conventional cable at 25 Tbps or slightly higher. Firmina has 16 fibre pairs with initial 320 Tbps capacity. It is the highest capacity cable to serve South America and dwarfs the rest of the subsea networks.  Firmina illustrates the rising dominance of the American tech companies in the subsea cable world. These companies account for 50% to 80% of global traffic. They build their own cables as opposed to leasing capacity because it reduces cost per bit. Moreover, complete network control and transparency leads to better performance in terms of uptime and latency. T...

This past autumn I did a post based on two insider conversations about an under-the-radar Facebook cable that would span the world with a W shape. I was told the cable would directly dconnect the US to South Africa and then head straight to India and onward to Australia before landing on the West Coast of the US. My theory at the time was that this was an AI driven project since the routing really didn't match Internet traffic flows or did not connect to major Internet exchange points (like Singapore) even though the route passes by them. The purported route latencies would be quite high which discourages carrier interest in purchasing capacity on the system.  So I figured its purpose was to move 'Big Data'. I am surprised to say I was right.  The one deviation from my initial understanding is that the 24 fibre pair cable will land in Brazil before veering for South Africa. A Brazil landing makes perfect sense in retrospect because Facebook's current capacity down to So...

Type of Cable System: Spatial Division Multiplexing.  Consortium Members: Amazon, Facebook, Keppel, and Telin. Construction Status: Behind schedule due to permitting delays for Indonesian waters.  Number of Fibre Pairs: Main trunk has 12. Some branches have 6.  Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2025. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 125 Tbps.  Salient Features: First low latency, three digit terabit cable between Singapore and USA.  Bifrost is the name of the burning rainbow bridge that connects Earth to the Realm of the Gods in Norse mythology. This new 12 fibre pair system is a wide lane digital bridge between Southeast Asia and North America (lands in the US and Mexico). It is the first direct single subsea cable solution connecting Singapore, Indonesia, and Philippines to North America that does not touch China or Hong Kong. The key consortium members include Facebook, Telin, Keppel (a new subsea player providing the Singapore landing), and Amazon. Singtel has ...