Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

A good Tech Capital article on the new wave of American Tech Giant cables in Asia:  https://thetechcapital.com/subsea-shake-up-how-new-cables-are-wiring-southeast-asias-ai-era/. My list of the most important new cables: 1. Apricot is a 12 fibre pair Southeast Asian cable with throughput of 290 Terabits. It bypasses China, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea in a clear signal to the Chinese government to get lost. Google and META are consortium members. 2. Echo is a 12 fibre pair Pacific cable directly linking Singapore to the United States. It has 144 Tbps throughput. Google and Facebook are equal partners in the project. The lower throughput reflects the 20,000 kilometer length of the cable. Same holds true for Bifrost. 3. Bifrost is the sister cable linking Singapore to the US. Its digital horse power is 180 Tbps. 4. Waterworth is a 480 Tbps behemoth with 24 fibre pairs. We still don't know the exact landing points in Asia. It will land on both the West and East coasts ...

META has started selecting landing sites. As the map below shows, the subsea cable's routing is unique, a record breaking 50,000 kilometers in length, and it will form a ring around the world. A ring allows Facebook to reroute traffic in the opposite direction if there is a fault. Waterworth is a 24 fibre pair system. That puts at the top of the fiber pair count for spatial division multiplexing systems. So figure a design transmission rate of a half petabit per second.  Although crazy news outlets have reported it will cost $10 billion, that figure is absurd. The project can easily be done for $2 billion or less even with extensive terrestrial trenching to create new and unique fibre routes. Will the project use new technologies like multicore fibre or multiband spectrum? Doubtful. The price tag dictates the META subsea cable design team will use standard proven technology. No one wants to tell their boss they just wasted $1.5 billion dollars. It is not good for your career. 😃 Wa...

1. The Waterworth cable will link the US to South Africa with a branching unit to Brazil. It extends from South Africa to India & onto to the Pacific and the US. The total length is greater than the Earth's circumference at approximately 50,000 kilometers. 2. Subsea cable projects are taking 3 to 5 years from initial idea to commercial service. 3. US traffic goes to Europe. It's aggregated with European originated traffic and then traverses the Mediterranean Sea to reach Egypt and takes terrestrial routes (Telecom Egypt) to the Red Sea. Then the traffic flows down the Red Sea. From there it either heads to India or bypasses it with Southeast Asia being the destination. 4. In the eyes of Facebook's subsea engineering team, the standard cable routing described above creates a host of problems. First of all , the Red Sea is a single point of failure. Same holds for Egypt. Secondly, the Mediterranean Sea requires many government permits as cables inevitably goes through ter...

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...