Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Obviously the new Equiano and 2Africa cables will dramatically improve African network reliabilty. In fact, Equiano provided a huge amount of restoration capacity for Internet backbones that lost European connectivity during the four cable outage off Abidjan this past spring. As long as the network operator could get their traffic to Lagos or South Africa, they could get hop onto Equiano and reach Europe.  Long term there are two primary ways to create a more resilient pan-African network. The Continent needs large fibre optic interstate highways connecting countries. The challenge is that most landlocked African states have not truly liberalized their markets to allow internal competition, foreign ownership or even cross border fibre ownership. Landline monopoly is the rule in these countries. For example, today, the only way to link Burkino Faso fibre to its Ivory Coast counterpart is via a border cross connect. There is no cross border fibre ownership permitted. This is a serious dr

In the last 8 months there have been three separate incidents demonstrating the extreme fragility of the African telecommunications industry. The Red Sea outages included EIG, which has some Northeast African landings. There was a two cable outage near South Africa's coastal waters and then there was the very painful four cable outage right off Abdijan, Côte d'Ivoire, which severely disrupted voice and data traffic within Africa and also between Africa and Europe.  The common thread is a lack of professionalism. In the case of the West African outage, all four of the cables (SAT-3, WACS, MainOne, and ACE) were placed within the Le Trou Sans Fin (hole without a bottom) subsea canyon. This canyon is well known for debris slides. Yet it did not stop four consortiums from using it. The risk was ignored. Undoubtedly, the consortiums will blame the Ivory Coast PTT for placing the landing station right on Abidjan's beaches. But a subsea cable network is never just the wet segment.

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 avoid NYC with its complex conduit systems

Technology: Spatial division multiplexing.  Fibre Pairs: 12.  Founding Father: Google Consortium Members: Google & Orange. The French PTT is best described as a junior partner.  RFS: January, 2021.  Route: Direct Ashburn Equinix to Paris. Landings: Virginia Beach, VA. Saint-Hillaire-de-Riez.  Notable Features: Second cable after Marea to directly link Ashburn Equinix to Europe. Dunant was first subsea network  in the world to deploy spatial division multiplexing and and achieve a two digit fibre pair count.  Dunant was the beginning of the spatial division multiplexing revolution. It was the first cable to leapfrog from the standard 4 to 8 fibre pair coherent optics paradigm for the Atlantic to the 12 to 32 pair spatial division multiplexing model that dominates today. Dunant went live January 19, 2021 with 12 fibre pairs and lit capacity of 250 terabits per second. However, the design capacity was even higher, 300 Tbps. The cable is named after the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant

Many networks have Paris and London POPs. Unfortunately,  the English Channel is teeming with cargo and fishing vessels. So subsea cable outages are common and made worse by the fact that only three new subsea cable has been built in the last 20 years, Scylla, Zeus, and CrossChannel. Most of the older cables are more susceptible to outages because undersea surveys and burial standards have sharply improved in the last 15 years.  In contrast, the Chunnel consists of two railroad tunnels plus a service tunnel carved out of solid rock, mostly chalk, approximately 75 meters below the sea floor and protected from sea water by a layer of clay. Fibre has been installed in these tunnels and several long haul providers offer the route at prices comparable to those on subsea cables. This is undoubtedly the most reliable route between the two countries and I highly recommend it as part of any network linking the UK to the European Continent. Feel free to contact me for more information and pricin