Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Amazon's core network business is cloud services. These services generate less network traffic over long distances than Google's web search and advertising busiess. Customers download their data, compute, and then retrieve it or store it there. Amazon may back up its customer's data in another data center in the same cloud region, but traffic flows from cloud region to cloud region are probably low. As a result, Amazon has been a follower in subsea cables. Often a silent or minority investor like in the Bifrost where it is getting lit capacity in exchange for providing the US landing station. In some cases, Amazon is not a consortium member, but a fibre pair customer. Amazon bought a fibre pair IRU on the Marea, which connects Virginia Beach to Spain, from Telxius. It was probably their first physical capacity ownership on a subsea cable.  More recently, Amazon announced its first solar project, Fastnet, which connects Ireland, where it owns several large data centers, to M...

Although most subsea cables with Singapore POPs land at Singapore, some do not, and these exceptions are the keys to better uptime for your Layer 1 network. Five fibre pair AAE1 lands at a Penang, Malaysia CLS that has a fully diverse fibre ring for automatic route protection into Singapore. Each side of the fibre ring uses a separate bridge to cross the Malaysian/Singapore border. One side of the ring terminates at the older of the two Global Switch data centers and the other at SG3. So AAE1 neither lands at Singapore nor uses any of the Singapore cable landing stations. This is one reason why AAE1 is a 'must' for network capacity buyers. Other reasons include low latency for the Marseille/Singapore end points and relatively good pricing due to the system's high capacity. Bay of Bengal Gateway also lands in Penang, Malaysia, but my understanding is that it and AAE1 use different cable landing stations. However, I have not seen backhaul maps so I cannot clai...

The 24 fibre pair repeatered cable links Genoa, Rome, Sardinia, and Sicily. It is very high capacity. Each fibre pair can transmit slightly in excess of 26 terabits per second for a grand total of over 624 Tbps. This is likely the highest transmission rate of any repeatered subsea cable to date. Uniterreno is constructing a Rome data center to which the cable will be connected. Unidata is the name of the data center division.  The cable illustrates a number of subsea communication trends. The 24 fibre pair count has become the de facto standard. When I worked at Hibernia Atlantic between 2005 and 2011, cables never exceeded 8 pairs. That was the technical and economic ceiling. In contrast, Facebook's Waterworth, Uniterreno, Anjana, Candle, and Medusa are all 24 pair systems. So half petabit repeatered cables are the new normal. Uniterreno also illustrates a recent trend to build very high subsea capacity cables that serve a single nation. High capacity single nation cables are quit...

In the late 90s Tyco Electronics (TE) purchased AT&T's subsea cable laying division. Stock prices of new fibre optic networks were soaring and priced at multiples similar to American Tech Giants today. So TE built a global subsea network, Tyco Global Network (TGN), to sell wholesale capacity. By the time it was completed in 2003, bandwidth pricing had collapsed. It was clear that the billions spent on TGN would never be recouped. By 2005, TATA, then known as VSNL, scooped it up for $130 million in one of the great contrarian investments in the telecom industry (Hibernia Atlantic's purchase in 2001 is another example). TATA got a lot. It included two Atlantic cables structured as a ring, dual cables linking India to Marseille and to Singapore plus a number of Pacific cables. TGN Pacific was one of those distressed assets. TGN Pacific was designed like most cables of that era to be self healing. Today most customers provide their own route protection via routers or switches....