Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Fastnet is a 16 fibre pair submarine network landing in Maryland and in Southern Ireland near Castlefreke. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the first cable in perhaps ten years to land in Ireland and the first landing ever in Maryland. The Irish landing makes perfect sense; Amazon has roughly 350,000 m2 of data center space in the country. It hosts an important cloud region (eu-west-1) there in large part due to a very low corporate tax rate. In addition, it just received clearance to build three data centers near Dublin totaling usable space of 42,585 m2. The choice of Maryland again shows that the hyperscalers value resiliency versus latency more than do the wholesale carriers and telecom incumbents. The latter focus on low latency routes for both Internet backbone and financial trading firms. The main US East Coast telecom hubs are Secaucus Equinix and Ashburn Equinix. If latency was Amazon's top priority, Maryland would not have been the landing point. The sa...

Reliable sources indicate that Google's 16 fiber pair Nuvem (Portuguese for 'cloud') cable has landed. There is typically a lag of a year between landings and RFS. So expect the system to be fully activated next Spring. I assume, without any insider knowledge, that either EXA or Telxius will acquire spectrum or a fiber pair on Nuvem. The cable's design capacity is 384 Tbps. Nuvem lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, also home to Anjana and Firmina. For Google, which owns the South Atlantic Firmina cable, this solves a big problem. It can move traffic between South America and Europe via the Myrtle Beach CLS. It also diversifies the routing of Google's Atlantic traffic and reduces latency for both the Southern US and Southern Europe. Interestingly enough, Google used a subsidiary as the landing partner at Myrtle Beach, and at Sines, Portugal. The hyperscalers are becoming increasingly vertically integrated. In the past it was customary to outsource landings and cab...

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...