Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

 At the 2026 Submarine Networks World in Singapore Ciena pitched the MOFN business model, the managed optical fiber network. This is a network dedicated to a single customer like a hyperscaler, large enterprise, government, and the like. It involves dedicated fibre pairs and equipment. Very often the customer buys the equipment and ships it to the network operator. It is quite common in Africa where network operators provide such services to the American Tech Giants. But carriers have often found that hyperscaler forecasts of capacity needs are often wildly off. The result is poor MOFN economics and low rates of return.

Ciena seems correct when it asserts massive growth from here to 2035. Heck, that is a 35 year Internet trend. But claiming that traffic will be 85% AI sounds like a very bad forecast. Right now the world is spending $2 trillion each year on AI infrastructure versus $100 billion in AI service revenues. A pretty big gap. We have experienced cycles of excess technology enthusiasm over the last 150 years and bullish forecasts have almost always proved wrong. 

1. Hyperscalers are worried that a capacity shortage will materialize two or three years down the road due to robust traffic growth and the absence of any major subsea cable project in the pipeline. Their network investment teams are studying the issue. 2. 2Africa is bypassing the Red Sea by building Northeast African routes that will connect either Mombasa to the Sudan 2Africa CLS in the Red Sea or a route from Djibouti to the same CLS. Decision has not yet been made. 3. 2Africa from Mombasa to Marseille should be live next summer. This will bring relief to carriers and ISPs alike. 4. Africa-1 project is struggling and may be out of funds. 5. Mombasa is the subsea cable hub, but Nairobi is the data center for Kenya. 6. Excess capacity on Equiano and 2Africa exists and ISPs should stock up before the Telecom Winter arrives.

Dr Kowalski is a Nokia employee who collaborates with ASN. His presentation on the first day of the conference is a good subsea cable primer.  The transmission equipment is known as the submarine line termination equipment or SLTE. It has three key components. Encoding involves taking the digital input and converting it into a series of laser commands according to the modulation scheme. FEC or forward error correction adds redundant bits called parity bits that help the far end FEC to detect and correct payload mistakes. It is a bit like a router creating the checksum field in the IP packet header. Once quality is control is completed, the laser sends the optical signal. Its ever weakening light travels the fibre until it is passively boosted by erbium doped fibre in the amplifier that has been raised to a high energy level by pump lasers. At the far end of the linear transmission the steps are reversed. The optical receiver takes the light signal and converts it into the appropria...

Landing late Monday in Lisbon. Departing Friday. Attending Atlantic Convergence at the Pátio da Galé in the City Centre.  Contact Details: Mobile 00-36-70-6055144. Work Email: roderick.beck@networksourcing.net. Also @roderickbeck on Telegram. And finally, via IM at https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderick-beck-94868948/.   Look forward to conversations and deal making.  Hot topics:  1. A half terabit of Equiano capacity available with LS1, OADC, and CT1 as the hand off data centres.  2. Inexpensive Lagos metro connectivity between OADC, MDXI, and Rack Centre.  3. Route Protected 100Gs CT1/JB2 at $8250 MRC. One year contract.