Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Right now EUNetworks is clearly the best carrier for Layer 1 Western European network capacity. I work on a daily basis with them. The carrier offers the best combination of performance, price, and commercial flexibility. They are my default go-to provider. Note they offer wavelengths, spectrum, and metro dark fibre among other services. For ISPs they offer lower latency general bandwidth routes than their competitors. This is a big deal for African and Asian ISPs who already endure high latency to the distances between Europe and these other continents. Their new Digital Super Highways are quite attractive. These massive upgrades of the standard Western Europe routes give them a distinct edge over the 2000 era networks of their competitors. Arelion is the best transit provider, but Hurricane Electric should be a part of the upstream mix as well. RETN also has good transit. All three are in the top 15 ASN ranking which is a measure of the number of BGP links to other ISPs. These ...

Marseille with its 16 cables tightly squeezed into reserved sea lanes and landing facilities violates the cardinal rule of network diversity. It's highly efficient, but resiliency requires physical diversity. In general, resiliency costs money because it requires not relying solely on the big interconnection points. Indeed, there is a fundamental conflict between minimizing network costs and maximizing performance. This has led consortiums and the digital titans to seek other landing points to reduce Marseille's importance. Besides being a long distance from Marseille and on a separate power grid, Genoa offers lower latency access to Italy's eyeballs as well as Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. The city offers clear advantages for a landing spot.  On the down side, landing cables at Genoa is more challenging than Marseille because cables must traverse more shallow waters to reach it. Cables must be threaded between Sardinia, Corsica, and Italy....