Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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...

1. The submarine line termination equipment, consisting of active electronics and transponders (lasers and optical receivers), was traditionally kept at the cable landing station. This began changing when carriers wanted to own and manage their own dedicated capacity (fibre pair or spectrum slice). Telekom Malaysia was an early example. It took two fibre pairs on the ASE cable as opposed to a fraction of the consortium lit capacity. Later the hyperscalers crystallized this evolution in the open cable model which limits common ownership to the wet segments. Each owner has either fibre pairs or spectrum and makes its own decisions concerning where to place the SLTEs. Because cable landing stations are not designed as large carrier neutral interconnection points, the SLTEs are almost always housed in a cage at a carrier netural data center. It is this flexibility in choice of location and equipment vendor that makes the open cable model so appealing. It also facilitates hyperscalers build...

Although most subsea cables with Singapore POPs land at Singapore, some do not, and these exceptions are the keys to better uptime for your Layer 1 network. Five fibre pair AAE1 lands at a Penang, Malaysia CLS that has a fully diverse fibre ring for automatic route protection into Singapore. Each side of the fibre ring uses a separate bridge to cross the Malaysian/Singapore border. One side of the ring terminates at the older of the two Global Switch data centers and the other at SG3. So AAE1 neither lands at Singapore nor uses any of the Singapore cable landing stations. This is one reason why AAE1 is a 'must' for network capacity buyers. Other reasons include low latency for the Marseille/Singapore end points and relatively good pricing due to the system's high capacity. Bay of Bengal Gateway also lands in Penang, Malaysia, but my understanding is that it and AAE1 use different cable landing stations. However, I have not seen backhaul maps so I cannot clai...

Building a resilient Layer 1 network where Singapore is a major POP is very difficult. Most subsea cables land in Singapore via designated sea lanes with four to five cables per lane. This increases the risk of a dragged anchor taking many cables. Although over the last ten years there have been few or none such incidents, a network planner is judged on future performance and proper risk management. Moreover, most subsea cables land at subsea cable landing stations (only 4 in total) serving many other cables. So dividing traffic among several cables is not good enough if resiliency is the goal. Tuas CLS: Apricot, Asia Direct Cable, Bifrost, I-2SEA, I2I, IAX, Indigo West, INSICA, MIST, MVISTA, PEACE, SEA-H2X, SMW4, SMW5, SMW6, SJC, & UMO. Tanna Merah: SEAX-1, BJC2, BJC3, & ASC. Changi North: AAG, BSCS, CANDLE, C2C, Echo, JAKABARE, MIC-1, RISING 8, TGN-IA, TGN-INDICOM, & TIS. Changi South: APG, ASE, C2C, MATRIX, & SJC2. Cable landing diversity is extremely hard to achieve...

NTT and Mitsui Leasing have teamed up together with fibre optic cable manufacturer Sumitomo Corporation to fund a 16 fibre pair subsea cable costing $500 million. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the second project on which NTT Data and Mitsui Leasing have cooperated. The high capacity 20 fibre pair Juno cable was the first project. It is unusual to see a large incumbent player like NTT undertaking a subsea cable project with a non-telecom company as co-owner. But the advantages are clear. Mitsui will contribute cash, but not play a major role in design, vendor selection or wholesale commercials. So it not only reduces NTT's risk by sharing funding requirements, but it gives NTT a free hand in decision making. One lesson that has become perfectly clear is that large carrier consortiums increase the likelihood of deployment delays and lengthen the entire planning cycle because decisions require consensus. Moreover, the consensus requirement makes it difficult for new approaches...

GNC is Guam's main carrier neutral data center. It doubles as a cable landing station. Usable colo space is 650 square meters. It has access to 2 megawatts. Guam's main energy source is diesel. A couple cables house their network equipment at the facility, including the Japan-Guam-Australia North and South networks (Google). The main problem for carriers considering Guam is that the PTT controls metro connectivity between the cable landing stations and data centers. The incumbent TeleGuam is a problem because it charges 10 to 20 times the kilometer rate as in developed Western cities like Amsterdam. A 100G metro wave ranges from $5K to $8K per month. That is more than 20% the cost of 100G waves from Singapore to Guam. One can get a dark fibre pair between Amsterdam data centres for 300 to 400 Euros a month. Guam offers the Pacific something it badly needs, a third telecom hub. Not an important place for peering, but ...

Tabua is part of Google's grand Pacific Initiative, a project to build a mesh-like web of subsea cables connecting Japan, the US, Australia, and many Pacific islands. The islands include Guam, Fiji, Hawaii, and French Polynesia. These islands play a crucial role: they provide power to keep throughput at higher levels than otherwise possible. Another key role for the islands is as telecom switching hubs with each cable landing station serving several high capacity cables.  Tabua is a standard 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable with two branches landing on the Australian and American sides. Design throughput is 17 Tbps per fibre pair. This dual branch approach has become popular because if the Queensland branch is damaged, traffic can be switched to the New Wales CLS with fibre linking the two cable landing stations. Similarly, on the US side, it lands in Hawaii and also Los Angeles. If the Hawaii/LA segment fails, then the traffic can be routed via other cables landin...

In the late 90s Tyco Electronics (TE) purchased AT&T's subsea cable laying division. Stock prices of new fibre optic networks were soaring and priced at multiples similar to American Tech Giants today. So TE built a global subsea network, Tyco Global Network (TGN), to sell wholesale capacity. By the time it was completed in 2003, bandwidth pricing had collapsed. It was clear that the billions spent on TGN would never be recouped. By 2005, TATA, then known as VSNL, scooped it up for $130 million in one of the great contrarian investments in the telecom industry (Hibernia Atlantic's purchase in 2001 is another example). TATA got a lot. It included two Atlantic cables structured as a ring, dual cables linking India to Marseille and to Singapore plus a number of Pacific cables. TGN Pacific was one of those distressed assets. TGN Pacific was designed like most cables of that era to be self healing. Today most customers provide their own route protection via routers or switches....

1. The West coast network from Lisbon and London to South Africa should be all activated by year's end. 2. Note that 2Africa is an open cable system which means each fibre pair and spectrum owner is responsible for their SLTEs. So it quite possible that consortium member X is ready today whereas member Y might be RFS only in December. 3. RFS Guidelines A. London, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa will be RFS at the beginning of September. B. Côte d'Ivoire should be live a month later. C. Senegal is at least 2 to 3 months from launch and could be as late Christmas. 4. Buying Guidelines A. I expect the combined impact of 2Africa and Equiano to drive Lisbon/Lagos 100G market pricing below $20K. On this route I recommend 1 year contracts. B. In Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and DRC you should do long term contracts because there is no guarantee that 2Africa will permanently lower pricing. Short term the cable will do so. But it is least 2 to 5 years before another modern cable lan...

***It is worth emphasizing that the DRC 2Africa CLS is a carrier neutral facility where all clients are treated equally with non-discriminatory and cost-based pricing and consortium-imposed performance standards. Moreover, there are several diverse fibre routes from the CLS to Kinshasa, which has several new carrier neutral data centers. The DRC market could be particularly interesting as it traditionally been a hell hole for telecom carriers. This means wholesale ISPs can sell at high transit prices. ***The other Congo (Brazzaville) is also on-net for 2Africa. And I can get you fibre transport across the river at wholesale prices to the DRC. 🙂 ***Special Note: ACR2, a Digital Realty data center in Accra, Ghana, is where most 2Africa capacity carriers keep their SLTEs.

A total of 9 cables land on the beaches near the small town of Bude, UK. There are four operational cable landing stations serving them in the Bude, UK area: two Vodafone CLS, a Colt (former Lumen) CLS, and a BT facility. Please click on https://lnkd.in/gGAP3QMA for a plethora of photos of the cable landing stations. The map illustrates the tendency for telecommunications networks to lack adequate physical diversity to ensure resiliency. Sometimes a laissez faire regulation is not the right approach. Most back haul fibre from the cable landing stations to London probably traverses the single road parallel to the beaches. See below.  When I worked at Hibernia Atlantic as an exclusive sales contractor, we cited the concentration of cables at Highbridge and Bude as good reasons to purchase capacity on the Hibernia North & South cables. North lands several hundred kilometers above Cornwall and at Halifax on the North American side. It was a compelling sales ptich. These cables toda...

Marseille was formerly a telecom backwater. It was a minor POP location. But then several things happened. The UK lost its super telecom hub status because it had become almost a single point of failure. Virtually every Atlantic cable linking the two continents landed in Cornwall, England. Secondly, Brexit meant that the UK was no longer part of Europe proper, but rather a political anomaly on its periphery. Thirdly, the Digital Titans recognized that most Asian-Europe traffic Asia was bound for the European continent. Latency could be sharply reduced by going up the Red Sea, across Egypt, and then traverse the Mediterranean to Southern European landings. Finally, traffic originating in Asia and destined for Europe was growing rapidly. So the bureaucrats of the Port Authority of Marseille built segregated landing facilities and sea lanes. Permit application process was streamlined so only one office was involved. Secure facilities were set up for power feeds. By the end of 2026, 16 cab...

Technology: Spatial Division Multiplexing. Fibre Pairs: 16.  Business Model: Consortium & Open Cable.  Fibre Pair Throughput: NA. Consortium Leaders: Google, Sparkle, Omantel.  Wholesale Capacity Players: Sify, Sparkle.  A point: Marseille Interxion.  Z point: Sify CLS, Mumbai.  Raman is the cable that could break open India's tightly controlled international capacity market. The cable is named after Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman who received the Nobel prize in 1930 for discovering that some of the light traversing a transparent medium is scattered and changes both wavelength and amplititude. This happens to be why the sea is blue. This 16 pair SDM cable will link Mumbai to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, and Jordan. Raman is striking in two respects. First, it is really an integrated part of the Blue-Raman cable that will function as an single network connecting Marseille to Mumbai and will be priced as a single, seamless capacity pr...