Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The Africa-1 cable is landing today in Duba, Saudi Arabia, a small port city, where a new CLS awaits it. Right now East African countries are suffering severe subsea cable capacity shortages that have driven 100G prices between Kenya and South Africa into the $40K to $65K per month range. Same for Kenya to Marseille. Only Seacom, 2Africa and Eassy link together the key East African counties. Seacom is a low capacity 2000 era system with chromatic dispersion fibre. Just a couple terabits per second. Eassy has more capacity at 36 Tbps, but both cables are in any case almost completely maxed out. 2Africa has huge capacity with an initial design throughput of 180 Tbps, but it is not connected to Europe via the Red Sea due to the recent Houthi hostilities. The only nearby telecom hub is South Africa. However, much of the East African traffic is ultimately destined for Europe. Hence the delays in lighting the Marseille/Mombasa 2Africa segment which would relieve the network congestion are th...

Satellite competes with terrestrial broadband because they are both access technologies. But all satellite networks generate traffic for the terrestrial backbones including the subsea cables. After all, there is little content stored in space! 😃 Hence satellite Internet providers must access data centers just like every other technology in the telecom world. Inter-satellite free space laser communication will bypass the terrestrial backbones to an extent, but this is really just a drop in the bucket. It works mostly for low bandwidth applications like email and instant messaging.  The graph shows the number of objects launched into low earth orbit from 1960 onward. This includes manned space craft, satellites, and unmanned spacecraft. Note that the dominant factor is SpaceX putting Starlink LEO satellites into orbit. As of January 2025, Starlink has 6,932 in space. In addition, Amazon Kuiper is deploying 3,236 LEO birds with the bulk of the fleet flying into orbit in 2025 and 2026...