Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The chart tells us that Ireland despite its low tax rates is quite costly with the highest power rates in the EU. It is often joked that a data centre is a power reseller and there's a lot of truth in that statement. For example, Equinix reports that power and cooling are 80% of its infrastructure operating expense. In general, a data centre's overall operating expense can be as much as 50% electricity. From what I can tell Irish data centre demand for electricity has grown much faster than the country's power capacity. Data centres consume 21% of Ireland's electricity versus 18% for households. This is an astonishing figure.  High German rates reflect the failed Energiewende. The system costs of wind and solar are extremely high in Germany and both sources are heavily subsidized via guaranteed tariffs because the load factors (annual capacity utilization rates) are very low. For example, a German solar farm only operates at 10% of capacity on an annual basis whereas Am...

The O band was the original or first official spectrum range in optical fibre optic communications. It includes the wavelengths ranging from 1260 nm to 1360 nm. The first fibre optic cable trials and deployments in the mid-70s were very short range ranging from a few metres to several kilometres. In 1977 the first phone voice traffic traversed a local fibre optic link in Long Beach, California. The Dorset, UK police deployed a fibre optic link in 1975, but unfortunately, I have been unable to ascertain the specific application. NORAD used fibre optic cables to connect computers at its underground Cheyenne Mountain headquarters in 1975. Note that this 1970 experiments used 850 nanometers as the semiconductor lasers were not capable of longer wavelengths. The O band became the de facto standard in the early 80s when the industry migrated from the early multimode fibres to single mode fibres and gallium arsenic enables lasers to to achieve the longer wavelengths of the O band. By 1988 com...

Both the Dutch government and municipalities have banned data centre building in Amsterdam as well as power upgrades for existing facilities. The initial data centre ban was lifted several years ago, but stringent energy efficiency standards have deterred subsequent building and created an image of a city hostile to business. On top of that, the municipality is denying power upgrades. For example, the only way to get incremental power right now at AM5, arguably the single best peering point in the city, is to get vacated or novated space. A client of mine asked for space there, but Equinix replied that power was maxed out and authorities had frozen the total power available to AM5 at the current level. Some local observers argue these moratoriums largely reflect infrastructure neglect in areas like transmission, but I suspect at least in part it is an attempt to appease the Dutch public over power rates. The current Dutch government qualifies as very right wing populist with a host of ...

Dutch governments need to stop being wimps and let the data centre industry grow. There is a moratorium on Amsterdam data centre build permits as well as power upgrades. Government leaders are supposed to lead, not cower in their offices afraid of public opinion. I have clients who cannot colocate in Amsterdam facilities such as AM5 because no spare power capacity is available. The Dutch government should long term add nuclear facilities to handle growing long term power demand and beef up the transmission networks as opposed to public-pleasing moratoriums on data centre building. Or pushing solar panels for a wet and rainy climate at high latitude. Picture below of AM5, one of the best peering points in the Netherlands. Clock on  https://thetechcapital.com/a-regulatory-chokehold-is-suffocating-amsterdams-data-centre-growth/ . 

C-Lion Cable Down In Baltic Sea C-Lion is an 8 fibre pair high capacity linear cable that went live in 2016. Transmission rate is 144 Tbps. The cable connects Helsinki data centers to Frankfurt via a cable traversing the Baltic Sea. C-Lion lands at Rostock, Germany, and at Helsinki. The Finnish government financed, owns, and operates the subsea network in the national interest. One goal of the project was to reduce network dependence on third country transit via Sweden or the Baltics. Another was to provide enough capacity to grow the Finnish data center market.  Finland offers many advantages for large data centers. Its cool climate dramatically lowers cooling costs as well as extending server life spans. There is also attractively priced, reliable, and abundant power in the form of hydro, nuclear, and wind. I think the large Google data center in Hamina, Finland opened the government's eyes to the economic potential that subsea capacity unlocks. Indeed, Google announced just a fe...

Funke Opeke, the CEO and founder of MainOne, resigned after selling her firm to Equinix for $320 million. MainOne was one of the first carrier neutral data centre companies in Nigeria and its MDXI facility is almost a must-have for ISPs. MainOne began life as a subsea cable company. At some point Opeke realized that carrier neutral data centers was an attractive business due to high occupancy rates and significant customer switching costs. Moreover, since African data centers often lack good connectivity, the MainOne cable was an excellent complement to any data center facility. MainOne just opened a new facility in Ghana, one of Africa's bright spots in terms of political culture, economic development, and pluralism. Click on this for more details https://thetechcapital.com/funke-opeke-resigns-as-ceo-of-mainone-following-320m-equinix-deal/. I guess I am too woke for the old telecom guard who have often expressed me to the idea that appointing women as senior managers is '...

Eastern Light is building a hybrid subsea-terrestrial dark fibre ring connecting Sweden, Finland, the Baltics, Germany, Denmark, and Norway. This morning I interviewed their sales director to better understand this ambitious project. The fibre pair count is 3x 144 pairs or 432 in total. No lit optical circuits or wavelengths will be sold. Instead, customers will be leasing or purchasing via IRU fibre pairs that they will light using their own equipment. There are ILAs for the subsea spans located   on islands, but the short distances make them an option, not a necessity. However, some customers will undoubtedly prefer buying less and optically amplifying to juice the transmission rates. Because it is a dark fibre network, the customer base will be predominantly hyperscalers, big carriers including the incumbents (Telia's international network is old), university research consortiums, governments including their national militaries, NATO, and banks. In particular, hyperscalers are e...

Most subsea cables connect countries, but increasingly we are seeing cables that serve only a single country for a variety of reasons.Either the country is not contiguous like Indonesia or the Philippines or the country is exceptionally large with isolated densely populated cities like Australia. Or it is sparsely settled like Alaska's coast which has no significant land infrastructure like roads or gas pipes to serve as telecom rights of way.  Unitirreno belongs to the former category. This SDM (spatial division multiplexing) 24 fibre pair cable will link Italy's principal territories, the Boot, Sicily, and Sardinia. The design throughput per fibre pair is 20 terabits or 480 terabits per second for the cable. Unitirreno, if built, will be a very high capacity system. Nearly half a petabit.  Here is the company's key sales pitch and commercial justifications: 1. Unitirreno cuts the latency in half between Sicily and Genoa and provides a completely diverse path to the terre...