Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Benoit Kowalski gave the presentation at the event. The diagram below shows the standard subsea network architecture. The fibre optic cable and optical amplifiers are collectively called the wet segment. The rule of thumb is to bury the cable in waters a thousand meters or less deep. Approaching shore one has a choice. One can give bring the cable ashore using small boats. The cable initially lies exposed on the beach up to the beach manhole. Then the cable is buried from some point in the water up to the manhole where it is spliced into the front haul fibre that carries the signal to the cable landing station. From the CLS back haul fibre goes to a carrier neutral data center that serves as a point of presence (POP) or interconnection point. The other platinum-plated approach uses horizontal drilling to install a bore pipe from the manhole to a point on the sea floor offshore. This is much more expensive, but better protects the cable.  A couple of things to note. I...

I've been in telecom since 1992. This qualifies me as an 'old fart' or 'dinosaur fossil' as American teenagers would say. This means I've seen every mistake made by subsea cable capacity owners. 1. Buying lots of capacity between cable landing stations, but owning no fibre from the CLS to the customers' destinations, namely the popular carrier neutral data centers. You can't be competitive if you must buy 100G or 400G metro waves from a UK landing station to Slough Equinix. Lease a dark fibre pair ring and light it with DWDM. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. Those network investments will dramatically improve operating margins. The amazing thing is that PPT members of cable consortiums make this mistake all the time. If it is worth spending $55 million for an undersea fibre pair, then it is worth adding a couple million to the pot for back haul IRUs. 2. Refusing to extend the network to new locations unless the order achieves an investment thre...

Equiano is a Google cable. A 12 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing system designed to do at least 12 Tbps per pair. This cable is a must-have for African ISPs as it connects the three key telecom hubs of Portugal (Lisbon Equinix (LS1)), Nigeria (the Open Access Data Center (OADC) in Lagos), and South Africa (Capetown Teraco (CT1) in South Africa), has massive capacity and is vastly more reliable than older African cables.  Equiano not only connects the key telecom hubs essential to West Africa's Internet, but is also buried two meters deep and avoids the dangerous undersea areas like the Congo canyon and Le Trou Sans Fin that have caused many subsea outages. Le Trou experienced a debris slide this Spring that caused 4 African cables (SAT3, Mainone, WACS, and ACE) to be severed in the Ivory Coast's territorial waters. Equiano saved West Africa's Internet from a complete subsequent meltdown as its capacity was used to reroute traffic to Lisbon or South Africa. Equiano...