Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

In general, the American Digital Giants care a lot about protecting their customers from third party eavesdropping because it would undermine customer confidence in their services. Apple has refused on occasion to cooperate with the FBI when the latter has tried to get access to encrypted Iphone messaging or Icloud storage in criminal cases. Similarly, Google introduced Gmail encryption to protect its end users privacy from third party sniffing.  I have heard repeatedly through the telecom grapevine that the OTTs were not happy with the British Snooper Law. This uncontrolled mass surveillance provided another strong reason to build subsea cables that bypass the UK in order to directly deliver Continental Europe destined traffic. As a result, we have Marea, Dunant, Amitié, and now Anjana connecting Virginia Beach, Boston, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to France & Spain. Let me quote from a UK human rights group: "The UK has the most intrusive mass surveillance regime of any ...

Like Firmina Anjana uses the Myrtle Beach CLS (DC Blox is the owner) for its US landing and is an extremely high capacity spatial division multiplexing cable with 24 fibre pairs. Design throughput is 480 Tbps. It is also a hyperscaler cable, a Meta project. The European landing is at Santander, Spain with Telxius providing the CLS. The name Anjana is a mystery to me. I assumed it was a Spanish name, but Anjana is also an Asian Indian female name that means complete and worthy.  Notable features include ***Record holder for highest capacity Trans-Atlantic cable at a half petabit day one. Note this is design capacity. It will undoubtedly be upgraded to even higher levels down the road. How much depends on coherent optics progress. ***Uses aluminum to conduct power. This works better than copper because it is lighter weight and less expensive. By using a slightly greater diameter aluminum can maintain the same voltage draw down as copper. ***Meta is landing the cable itself in US wate...

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...

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...

The private credit company P Capital Partners has ousted this ambitious project's founders and seized control. It appears P Capital extended a loan to finance Eastern Light back in 2021. As is standard, the debt covenants probably included the right to oust management and become the company's owner if certain conditions were not met. The new owners specialize in offering high interest rate, loans so that companies can avoid equity dilution. According to the company's press release, prior management was unable to meet the key requirement of new equity financing. Hence they were fired. It is important to understand how these greenfield projects work. Generally, founders invest money in the project as equity. Since these projects are unlikely to generate cash flow for many years, equity is the appropriate financing. The project is high risk and can only be justified if there are high returns.  Banks and other credit providers generally finance projects that already are genera...

Telecom Egypt and Mobily are cooperating on a new subsea cable connecting Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Telecom Egypt is a PTT whereas Mobily is a competitive Saudi Arabian mobile operator. Few details regarding the project are available. Mobily is financing the project whereas TE is the cable landing partner. This project reflects a broad trend where competitive mobile providers are becoming more involved in connecting Middle Eastern countries both to reduce their own costs and also create strategic alliances. In fact, Mobily is following the same game plan as the much larger Vodafone and Bharti Airtel. As mobile voice and data traffic becomes increasingly international, mobile providers acquire more international capacity and often the wholesale market. Typically, they buy more than they need themselves because bigger purchases lower per bit costs. Then they sell the excess capacity in the wholesale market. This is how Bharti entered the wholesale telecom market. Most likely this new cabl...

The network topology was originally designed to bypass both the Red Sea and Egypt. Instead, the cable goes from Sify's Mumbai CLS to a branching unit near Bubar. It splits North to land at Barka, Oman whereas the main trunk heads Southwest to land at Salalah, Oman. Then back to sea to Djibouti, which is the Internet gateway for a group of landlocked African states like Ethiopa and South Sudan. From Djibouti it heads North through the Red Sea to come ashore at Duba, Saudi Arabia. The cable goes terrestrial from this point up to a modern carrier neutral data center at Aqaba, Jordan. Then the terrestrial route crosses into Israel and eventually terminates at the Sparkle CLS near Tel Aviv. From there it traverses the Mediterranean Sea to ultimately come ashore at Marseille and Genoa. Marseille Interxion and a Milano data center campus called Stack Infrastructure are the key European subsea cable POPs. The Genoa POP is Equinix GN1.  I am a bit disappointed because early reports suggeste...

The IAX cable links Chennai and Mumbai to Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Jio Reliance and China Mobile are the primary consortium members but press releases suggest there is a silent digital giant partner as well. An educated guess would be Google, Microsoft or Facebook. Information is scarce on the system. It will likely be 16 pairs like its IEX counterpart. This suggests that design capacity will easily exceed 200 Tbps. India desperately more bandwidth, but given Jio's leading role it is not clear it will lower Layer 1 pricing. On the flip side, China Mobile would be unlikely to participate in a project unless it could provide end-to-end connectivity to its customers. So I believe modest optimism is the correct frame of mind. 

Technology: Standard 100G wave coherent optics. Shorter repeater spacings to maximize per fibre pair throughput.  Fibre Pairs: 8.  Founding Fathers: Facebook and Microsoft Consortium Members: Facebook, Microsoft, and Telxius.  RFS: May, 2018.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Spain.  Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Bilbao, Spain.  Notable Features: First cable to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Also first cable to adopt the open cable system model where each consortium member selects their own submarine line termination gear and owns either fibre pairs or spectrum.  Potential Throughput: 224 Tbps.  Marea is the first cable to give the cold shoulder to New York City and the UK. It directly links Ashburn Equinix via a Virginia Beach landing to Continental Europe with a Spanish landing. The cable completely bypasses the UK and the Northeastern US. This reflected Ashburn Equinix' rising importance and the desire of network planners  to avo...

Many networks have Paris and London POPs. Unfortunately,  the English Channel is teeming with cargo and fishing vessels. So subsea cable outages are common and made worse by the fact that only three new subsea cable has been built in the last 20 years, Scylla, Zeus, and CrossChannel. Most of the older cables are more susceptible to outages because undersea surveys and burial standards have sharply improved in the last 15 years.  In contrast, the Chunnel consists of two railroad tunnels plus a service tunnel carved out of solid rock, mostly chalk, approximately 75 meters below the sea floor and protected from sea water by a layer of clay. Fibre has been installed in these tunnels and several long haul providers offer the route at prices comparable to those on subsea cables. This is undoubtedly the most reliable route between the two countries and I highly recommend it as part of any network linking the UK to the European Continent. Feel free to contact me for more information a...

  A good primer on the physical structure of an optical fibre strand with some basic physics to give you insight into how it really works. Optical fibre is an ultra pure, high quality glass designed to carry infrared laser signals encoding bits, in other words, zeros and ones. It consists of a core which is the optical highway for the laser light, a cladding designed to protect the core and prevent external light from reaching the core or light traversing the core from escaping, and finally, soft and hard plastic coatings as further protection. For full details, see https://learn.aflglobal.com/enterprise/the-basic-structure-of-optical-fiber.

2Africa Landings Luando, Angola Manama, Bahrain Moroni, Comoros Muanda, Democratic Republic of Congo Pointe-Noire, Congo Abidjan, Ivory Coast Djibouti City, Djibouti Port Said, Egypt Ras Ghareb, Egypt Suez, Egypt Zafarana, Egypt Marseille, France Libreville, Gabon Accra, Ghana Tympaki, Greece Mumbai, India Al Faw, Iraq Genoa, Italy Mombasa, Kenya Mtwapa, Kenya Kuwait City, Kuwait Mahajanga, Madagascar Maputo, Mozambique Nacala, Mozambique Kwa Ibo, Nigeria Lagos, Nigeria Barka, Oman Salalah, Oman Karachi, Pakistan Caravelos, Portugal Doha, Quatar Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia Duba, Saudi Arabia Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Yanbu, Saudi Arabia Dakar, Senegal Carana, Seychelles Berbera, Somalia Mogadishu, Somalia Amanzimtoti, South Africa Duynefontein, South Africa Ggeberha, South Africa Yzerfontein, South Africa Barcelona, Spain Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain Port Sudan, Sudan Dar Es Salam, Tanzania Abu Dhabi, UAE Kalba, UAE Bude, UK Sources:  https://www.2africacable.net/, https://wiocc...