Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The Real Lessons of Iran's Attacks on AWS Data Centers 1. The Middle East is fundamentally unstable. The entire region is bedeviled by historic conflicts based on religious divisions (Shiite, Sunni, Christian, and Jewish), distrust between Europe and Islam going back to the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire, a lack of strong independent institutions, weak rule of law, lack of democratically legitimate governments, and limited acceptance of the notion of secularism (the idea that religion and government should be strictly separate to maximize freedom and ensure equal treatment). Even the so-called benevolent monarchies that border the Persian Gulf have absolute power and absolute power always corrupts in the end. Monarchies are outdated institutions. Don't imagine or suggest otherwise. Recent governments in the region have promised stability and peace, but extremism abounds. Israel's ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Afghanistan's repression of women, Trump's foolish acts of a...

In a conversation I had today with the editor of Capacity Media, I suggested the top challenge for the global subsea cable industry over the next five years is how to thread intercontinental traffic through the Middle East to Europe, India, and Asia. Trump's attack on Iran has shut down the Persian Gulf, which many subsea cable consortiums viewed as their best hope for a Red Sea bypass route. If wet segment outages happened, there would be no way to repair them today, just like the Red Sea off Yemen. Thank you, Donald.  In fact, SWM6 goes up the Persian Gulf and lands at Bahrain. It is linked to fibre along a highway from Bahrain to the cable landing station in Saudi's Arabia's resort city of Jeddah. So the SMW6 bypass uses the Persian Gulf up to Bahrain, traverses the Desert, and then rides the Red Sea to an Egyptian CLS. In addition, persistent rumors suggest that Blue-Raman will traverse Kuwait as part of a terrestrial route to reach the Red Sea. I don...

The Pacific and Southeast Asia have two major telecom hubs: Tokyo and Singapore. Tokyo's status reflects its importance as the capital of one of Asia's largest economies with huge trade and financial flows with the United States as well as a defense treaty. Tokyo dominates Japan like Paris does France. Singapore's emergence reflects Hong Kong's downfall due to the Chinese government's failure to honor its commitment to HK autonomy. China requires any political candidate for HK office to be approved by it. Hence every HK politician is de facto a Beijing puppet. Secondly, China's security laws allow the arrest of anyone criticizing the Chinese government. The collapse of HK's rule of law is illustrated by numerous arrests of anyone peacefully opposing the government. You can go to jail for wearing a T-shirt advocating HK independence. In contrast, Singapore is neutral in the geopolitical war between the US and China and its judges are independen...

The planned Bulikala cable connects Google's modular prefabricated Guam CLS to Fiji. The branch is right below Guam on the map at the bottom of this page. It is part of a large scale Google project costing a billion dollars  to dramatically increase Pacific subsea throughput and resiliency via a web of island hopping fibre optic cables. These small islands such as Fiji, Christmas Island, the Marshalls, and Polynesia offer diverse network routing that is particularly valuable in case of a subsea cable segment goes dark. They also offer power, which is the gating factor for throughput over long distances. All power conductors lead to voltage drawdown which limits bandwidth. Boosting power at intermediate points will allow higher transmission rates and lead to better return on the capital invested. The overall plan is to connect Japan, Guam, Hawaii, many islands such as Fiji and French Polynesia to the US in such a way as to increase both throughput via power stops at small islands a...

This new subsea cable perfectly illustrates how these undersea digital highways have become instruments of political power and foreign policy. The Chinese government is lending the Cambodian government the money required to build a subsea cable that China Uncom will operate for Cambodia and which Hauwei Marine will undoubtedly build. Since it goes to Hong Kong China will probably tap the cable and record the bits traversing it. Now encryption protects the data payload, but not the header routing information. So the IP addresses can be captured and much can be deduced from them. Unfortunately, few details are available regarding the new network. The Chinese government clearly wants to be able to monitor and capture the region's data flows so subsidizing cables to land in China and to be built by Hauwei is in their eyes is simply prudent national security policy.