Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Few details are available at this point. It has been clear to me for some time that the 2Africa and Equiano networks are insufficient to meet growing African Internet traffic. This reflects two factors. First, the limited number of Equiano landings: Togo, Nigeria, Namibia, and South Africa. Secondly, the 2Africa has only 180 Tbps of capacity, but serves 17 African states. Moreover, it also serves many Middle East countries, Pakistan, and India. The Nigerian government is concerned that the country lacks subsea resiliency. Published reports hint at its desire for a new route, but it is not obvious what it would be. One possibility is a direct US-Nigeria link perhaps connecting Atlanta or Ashburn Equinix to Lagos. Or perhaps a Nigeria to France or Spain direct link. Bloomberg article on subject: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-23/nigeria-in-advanced-talks-with-google-for-new-undersea-cable. 

The American tech giant is deploying a high capacity cable directly linking Thailand to Christmas Island, which in turn will be connected by two diverse cables to Australia. The new route is unusual as it goes around Indonesia to reach Thailand's slender West Coast leg as opposed to threading the Sundra Stait and traversing the very busy waters off Singapore and up the Bay of Thailand. I told an international development bank a few weeks ago that it would make sense to do such a landing in order to avoid the crowded and congested Thailand Bay. My idea was to link India's East Coast to Thailand via its slender Southern leg. It is always a good idea to avoid routes that are already heavily used by subsea cables to improve resiliency. In this case, it also avoids ship-infested waters that pose a high risk of subsea cable damage. This new project makes two things very clear. Google's subsea cable guys are looking to reduce their network's reliance on Singapore, which is th...

Facebook engineers during an interview on the Waterworth project provided details about their next big project. 1. Facebook is planning to build the first one petabit per second Atlantic cable. No details yet available on end points. Given traffic flows it is most likely to directly connect Continental Europe and the US. 2. META engineering is looking at three options to achieve one petabit per second throughput. A. Using both the C and L spectrum. This would effectively double the bandwidth. B. Cable will definitely be SDM (spatial division multiplexing). Strong likelihood that will be 48 pairs. C. Another possibility is two core optical fibre in order to double the bandwidth per pair. 3. I believe the most likely option is using C and L bandwidth. Arelion has incorporated L band spectrum into its DWDM Layer 1 service between Atlanta data centers and Ashburn Equinix using Infinera gear. Colt and Sparkle have used the L band on terrestrial routes. Most DWDM equipment today offers both ...

Several sources have whispered in my ear that META is planning a new 16 fibre pair cable that will encompass the world going from the US East Coast to the US West Coast via the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The most ambitious subsea project ever undertaken. I do not know the exact routing. I know that the cable will launch from the American East Coast and will go down the West African Coast to South Africa and then head straight to Mumbai. It is not clear if Europe will be online or not. From Mumbai it will head straight to Australia and then up to the US West Coast. I speculate that there may be branching units to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But the basic routing is US/South Africa/India/Australia/US. What is not clear is if there will be branching units to add more countries to the cable.  This semi-secret cable reflects META's desire for network resiliency given the four month Red Sea down time that AAE-1 and other subsea cables suffered during the first half ...