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Showing posts with the label physical diversity

Why The UK Has Declined As An International Subsea Cable Hub - Part 2

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In general, the American Digital Giants care a lot about protecting their customers from third party eavesdropping because it would undermine customer confidence in their services. Apple has refused on occasion to cooperate with the FBI when the latter has tried to get access to encrypted Iphone messaging or Icloud storage in criminal cases. Similarly, Google introduced Gmail encryption to protect its end users privacy from third party sniffing.  I have heard repeatedly through the telecom grapevine that the OTTs were not happy with the British Snooper Law. This uncontrolled mass surveillance provided another strong reason to build subsea cables that bypass the UK in order to directly deliver Continental Europe destined traffic. As a result, we have Marea, Dunant, Amitié, and now Anjana connecting Virginia Beach, Boston, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to France & Spain. Let me quote from a UK human rights group: "The UK has the most intrusive mass surveillance regime of any ...

Why The UK Has Declined As An International Subsea Cable Hub - Part 1

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At the beginning of the third millennium almost all Trans-Atlantic cables directly linked the US or Canada to either Ireland or the UK. Flag North landed at Northport, New York, and Bude, UK. Hibernia North (EXA North) was a rare exception. It came ashore at Halifax and also in Southport, UK. Yellow touched ground on Long Island and at Bude. AC2 came ashore also at Brookhaven and Bude. Hibernia South (EXA South) landed in Halifax and also at Dublin. Finally, Apollo North touched ground at Brookhaven and Bude. Clearly this is inadequate physical diversity in terms of landing points and cable landing stations. It is highly cost effective because subsea cables can share common terrestrial infrastructure, but cost and resiliency are sworn enemies. There is almost always a tradeoff. Almost all Trans-Atlantic traffic went to the 9th floor Telx facility at 60 Hudson and the 111 8th Avenue data centre in Manhattan. In London the destination was almost invariably the Telehouse North and East da...

The Eternal Conflict Between Network Resiliency, Latency, & Cost

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Network resiliency defined as up time entails higher build and operating costs. Resiliency in the subsea cable world reflects two basic principles: good construction practice and physical diversity. Good construction includes an undersea route that minimizes damage and time to repair. In practice this means avoiding areas where there are geophysical threats. These threats include ships, debris slides, earthquakes, and strong undersea currents that erode the protecting shielding of deep sea cables. Good practices include deep burial, undersea repeater redundancy (the number of  spare amplifiers in an undersea repeater), cable armor thickness, etc. Physical diversity means putting a big distance end-to-end between the subsea network and other submarine cables. The farther apart, the less likely a common event disrupts two or more cables. In most cases this means longer undersea paths that increase the construction bill as well as planning costs. Good examples include  the Aprico...

Bude, UK Subsea Cable Landscape & Resiliency Concerns

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A total of 9 cables land on the beaches near the small town of Bude, UK. There are four operational cable landing stations serving them in the Bude, UK area: two Vodafone CLS, a Colt (former Lumen) CLS, and a BT facility. Please click on https://lnkd.in/gGAP3QMA for a plethora of photos of the cable landing stations. The map illustrates the tendency for telecommunications networks to lack adequate physical diversity to ensure resiliency. Sometimes a laissez faire regulation is not the right approach. Most back haul fibre from the cable landing stations to London probably traverses the single road parallel to the beaches. See below.  When I worked at Hibernia Atlantic as an exclusive sales contractor, we cited the concentration of cables at Highbridge and Bude as good reasons to purchase capacity on the Hibernia North & South cables. North lands several hundred kilometers above Cornwall and at Halifax on the North American side. It was a compelling sales ptich. These cables toda...

Trieste: A Candidate Telecom Subsea Cable Hub

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Several data centre companies have asked for my thoughts on potential data centre sites that could exploit nearby subsea cable landings. Obviously there is a need for a new data centre in Marseille diverse to the Interxion sites. In fact, Telehouse Europe has such a plan, already has purchased a plot of land, and has LOIs from long haul carriers to bring it online. Quadrivium is retrofitting a former corporate data facility in Genoa to leverage 2Africa, Blue Raman, and the other cables that call it their home.  Trieste is my nomination for a future cable landing station and Internet gateway. The city has a large port that could easily accommodate subsea cables. Furthermore, the latency of an intercontinental subsea network landing in Trieste and delivering traffic to Milano, Zurich, Vienna, and Frankfurt is definitely lower than routing via Marseille and even Genoa. So Trieste offers diversity without a latency penalty for central Europe and Scandinavia.  Trieste was a great p...

More On Blue Raman - The Definitive Topology

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The network topology was originally designed to bypass both the Red Sea and Egypt. Instead, the cable goes from Sify's Mumbai CLS to a branching unit near Bubar. It splits North to land at Barka, Oman whereas the main trunk heads Southwest to land at Salalah, Oman. Then back to sea to Djibouti, which is the Internet gateway for a group of landlocked African states like Ethiopa and South Sudan. From Djibouti it heads North through the Red Sea to come ashore at Duba, Saudi Arabia. The cable goes terrestrial from this point up to a modern carrier neutral data center at Aqaba, Jordan. Then the terrestrial route crosses into Israel and eventually terminates at the Sparkle CLS near Tel Aviv. From there it traverses the Mediterranean Sea to ultimately come ashore at Marseille and Genoa. Marseille Interxion and a Milano data center campus called Stack Infrastructure are the key European subsea cable POPs. The Genoa POP is Equinix GN1.  I am a bit disappointed because early reports suggeste...

An Emerging Subsea Telecom Hub: Genoa

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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....

New Subsea Cables RFS 2025: Unitirreno

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Most subsea cables connect countries, but increasingly we are seeing cables that serve only a single country for a variety of reasons.Either the country is not contiguous like Indonesia or the Philippines or the country is exceptionally large with isolated densely populated cities like Australia. Or it is sparsely settled like Alaska's coast which has no significant land infrastructure like roads or gas pipes to serve as telecom rights of way.  Unitirreno belongs to the former category. This SDM (spatial division multiplexing) 24 fibre pair cable will link Italy's principal territories, the Boot, Sicily, and Sardinia. The design throughput per fibre pair is 20 terabits or 480 terabits per second for the cable. Unitirreno, if built, will be a very high capacity system. Nearly half a petabit.  Here is the company's key sales pitch and commercial justifications: 1. Unitirreno cuts the latency in half between Sicily and Genoa and provides a completely diverse path to the terre...

The Marea Subsea Cable: A Pioneer Of The Open Cable Model And New TransAtlantic Routing

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Technology: Standard 100G wave coherent optics. Shorter repeater spacings to maximize per fibre pair throughput.  Fibre Pairs: 8.  Founding Fathers: Facebook and Microsoft Consortium Members: Facebook, Microsoft, and Telxius.  RFS: May, 2018.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Spain.  Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Bilbao, Spain.  Notable Features: First cable to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Also first cable to adopt the open cable system model where each consortium member selects their own submarine line termination gear and owns either fibre pairs or spectrum.  Potential Throughput: 224 Tbps.  Marea is the first cable to give the cold shoulder to New York City and the UK. It directly links Ashburn Equinix via a Virginia Beach landing to Continental Europe with a Spanish landing. The cable completely bypasses the UK and the Northeastern US. This reflected Ashburn Equinix' rising importance and the desire of network planners  to avo...