Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

This new 6 fiber pair cable directly connects Taiwan and the United States. It is a relatively low capacity system clocking 12.8 Tbps per fibre pair or 76.8 Tbps in total. It is the norm in our era for new ocean spanning cables to have at least 12 pairs and as many as 24. In that sense Orca is a throw back to the age of low fibre pair count coherent optical networks as opposed to the current high count spatial division multiplexing approach pioneered by Google's Dunant cable. Most likely META's traffic forecast is insufficient to justify a bigger count as Taiwan is a niche market of only 23 million people. While its economic significance is hard to exaggerate as the world's leading supplier of semiconductor chips, population still determines the size of traffic flows with a few exceptions like Singapore. It would not be surprising given the cable's transmission capacity if META keeps its all for its own use.  META subsidiaries land and hold the cable landing licenses o...

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...

Amazon Ireland has applied for a maritime usage license to land a planned cable connecting Ireland to the United States. It is considering landing the cable near Castlefreke on Ireland's Southeast Coast in County Cork along a stretch of beach called the Strand. Amazon has made no public announcement so far. Here is the filed application . I discovered this when I came across a local Irish newspaper that mentioned that Amazon was looking at a nearby beach for a cable landing. I then did a Google search and found the filing. All these filings are posted online and they are 'leading indicators' as economists would say of what is going to happen.  No Trans-Atlantic subsea cables currently land on Ireland's South Coast other than EXA's Express and that is part of the reason that Amazon finds it so appealing. Such a cable would be physically diverse at least on the terrestrial side to the Irish Sea and older Atlantic cables like Hibernia North and South and AC1. I can nev...