Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Iceland's New Audur Subsea Cable Farice is building a new 16 to 24 fibre pair cable named after an Icelandic matriarch, Audur The Deep Minded, who sailed from Scotland to Iceland in the 9th century during the first wave of migration to the island. The cable lands in Southeast Iceland and in Scotland near Glasgow. The Icelandic backhaul will be fibre, but the British side is most likely spectrum. Farice views Audur as a replacement for the 22 year old FARICE-1. The ship survey will take place in the summer of 2027 with RFS planned for 2030. Audur falls into the monster capacity cable category. Sixteen fibre pairs can easily achieve 320 Tbps with 24 fibre pairs almost reaching a half petabit per second. What is really striking about this is Iceland's population, which although rapidly increasing due to immigration, is just shy of 400K. Undoubtedly, this reflects Farice's bullish assessment of data center demand driven by cheap hydro power and modest cooling needs. Although Ic...

With the exception of 2Africa, which has two landings one of which is 500 kilometers South of Lagos, all Nigerian landings are along a 25 kilometer wide beach in an area called Lekki. I expect 2Africa and Equiano to dominate the transport market going forward with 2Africa finally live in February or early March. At that point I expect combined capacity of these two modern cables to push prices into the teens for 100G waves. The older subsea cables like WACS, ACE, MainOne, SAT3, and GLO-1 will struggle to compete because their per bit costs are much higher. These older cables have far less capacity, but similar operating expenses similar to 2Africa or Equiano. For example, the older cables probably pay as much if not more for maintenance given their higher fault frequency. They are more likely to experience outages due to shallower burial and riskier routing through the blue ocean than either Equiano or 2Africa. Inferior service, higher costs. Not a recipe for success.  Unlike thei...