Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Type of Cable System: Spatial Division Multiplexing.  Consortium Members: Amazon, Facebook, Keppel, and Telin. Construction Status: Behind schedule due to permitting delays for Indonesian waters.  Number of Fibre Pairs: Main trunk has 12. Some branches have 6.  Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2025. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 125 Tbps.  Salient Features: First low latency, three digit terabit cable between Singapore and USA.  Bifrost is the name of the burning rainbow bridge that connects Earth to the Realm of the Gods in Norse mythology. This new 12 fibre pair system is a wide lane digital bridge between Southeast Asia and North America (lands in the US and Mexico). It is the first direct single subsea cable solution connecting Singapore, Indonesia, and Philippines to North America that does not touch China or Hong Kong. The key consortium members include Facebook, Telin, Keppel (a new subsea player providing the Singapore landing), and Amazon. Singtel has some lit capacity on the

Besides Scylla  and Zeus , Crosslake's CrossChannel is the only other new English Channel cable built in the last 20 years. There was a 1998-2002 subsea construction boom and in wake of the subsequent capacity glut affecting the Atlantic and Europe, all further building ceased until the last 5 years. Scylla and CrossChannel are similar in many respects : unrepeatered 96 fibre pair double armoured cables owned by private operators as opposed to consortiums and both backed by infrastructure funds. The consortium model is less common in North America and Europe because there are fewer barriers to entry such as monopoly or semi-deregulated telecom markets. So including the incumbents in order to facilitate landing a subsea cable is unnecessary. It is interesting that all three cables are unrepeatered. Prior to their construction, most or all of the English Channel cables were low fibre count, repeatered networks. I suspect improvements in fibre purity and more importantly coherent opti