Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Routing: Singapore/Tokyo/LA/Secaucus Equinix/Slough Equinix.

Asia United Group East (AUG East) cable's main trunk links Tokyo and Singapore with branches to South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and possibly Indonesia (the consortium has stated the cable will land in Indonesia, but the map below shows Indonesia is off-net). Few project details are available. Fibre pair count is unknown, but it will be at least 16 and likely as much as 24 fibre pairs given the region's incredible Layer 3 traffic growth. Consortium members include Microsoft, Amazon, Singtel, the Japanese long haul carrier ARTERIA, Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan PTT), DREAMLINE (Korean competitive carrier), GLOBE Telecom, and Unified National Networks (Brunei). Like Candle, it avoids the South China Sea by hugging its perimeter in order to avoid Chinese permitting (China claims the South China Sea as territorial waters and requires Chinese government permits for all subsea cables laid in it) and put distance between itself and the large number of cables packed toget...

Candle is one of the more interesting Intra-Asian cables to go live over the next several years. It is the first 24 fibre pair system to serve this region. Total transmission capacity is 570 Tbps. This makes it one of the highest capacity cables on the planet. Like Apricot, Candle avoids the South China Sea due to Beijing's territorial claims and permitting demands. The main trunk links the inseparable couple of Tokyo and Singapore with branches into the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Consortium leaders include META, Softbank, and Telekom Malaysia. This project, like Apricot, exemplifies the geopolitics of American-Chinese rivalry. Hyperscalers avoid China and HK and exchange traffic at neutral Singapore. However, the routing is shorter than Apricot because Candle is deployed at the edge of the South China Sea as opposed to a long detour around Indonesia and up the East Coast of the Philippines. Like Apricot, Candle offers physical diversity to the usual suspects mak...

The Echo cable is a 12 fibre network directly linking Singapore to California with with a Guam branching unit. Bifrost, the other cable connecting Singapore and the US, also lands in Bifrost. I believe each cable effectively serves as backup for the other because traffic can be rerouted at Guam. Both cables are only 12 fibre pairs due to the great distances involved. Its design capacity is 260 Tbps. A key feature of both Bifrost and Echo is they bypass the South China Sea even though it is part of the shortest path between Singapore and the US West Coast. Hence Chinese permits are avoided, resiliency is improved since most Intra-Asian traffic traverses the South China Sea, and the cable is more protected from Chinese tapping or attack. However, it does come as a price. The cable must be buried quite deep through the shallow Indonesian waters to minimize fishing boat or anchor damage. And Indonesia is quite slow to issue permits for new subsea cables. So two cables likely...

Apricot is one of the most exciting Southeastern Asian cable projects to be RFS next year. In fact, it is the first subsea network to be truly physically diverse from the South China Sea. The 12 fibre pair main trunk's end points are Singapore and Tokyo, but the path completely bypasses the South China Sea by detouring through Indonesia and up the Philippines' East Coast. This increases latency, but makes Apricot the natural complement for any cable system like ADC or SJC2 that goes through the South China Sea. Obviously the latency is higher than the usual suspects, but most buyers need resilient networks to keep their jobs. Apricot lands in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Guam, and Japan. The cable system has military value as it links Taiwan to the Guam, the latter being the US military command center for the Western Pacific. Its routing around the South China Sea also makes it less vulnerable to sabotage. Design capacity was originally intended to be 211 Tbps...

1. Ellalink connects Europe to Brazil. It offers a unique fibre optic path between Brazil and Europe. It is also much shorter than combining an Atlantic cable with a South American cable or an African cable with SACS or SAIL. Ellalink sharply lowers latency for traffic whose end points are South America and Europe. It adds resiliency as well to the regional telecom ecosystem. Wave costs are over $10K for a 10G and from the upper 20s to low 30s for a 100G.  Nonetheless, it struggled to get private funding because there is simply not a lot of traffic between Portuguese speaking Brazil and Europe. Most South American ISPs can more cheaply and conveniently do their peering and pick up content in Miami. A 100G wave from the Sao Paolo Equinix complex to the Miami NAP is now under $10K. That is a third less than going to Europe via Ellalink to pick up the same content or peer with the same counterparts. In fact, Ellalink should be cheaper than moving traffic from South America to Europe v...

Rumors have been floating around for several months about a successor project to AAE1 known as AAE2. Like AAE1, the key goal is to connect Hong Kong and Singapore to India, the Middle East, and Europe. The core consortium includes PCCW, Telecom Egypt, Omantel, and Sparkle. Just like other recent projects such as SMW6, AAE2 will avoid the Red Sea. Instead, the cable will land in Oman, then traverse Saudi Arabia and Egypt to reach the Red Sea. I applaud the cable's designers for ditching the Red Sea. It was long overdue. However, a more logical approach is to avoid Egypt all together. The Saudi Arabian desert will be expensive. The consortium has increased both capex and opex further by using Egypt for transit. Egypt treats subsea cables the way a toll road treats cars. It extracts a monopoly fee from them. It makes no sense given that Israel has a competitive telecom market versus Egypt's pseudo competitive market.  Another interesting design feature is that Italy was mentioned ...

1. The Waterworth cable will link the US to South Africa with a branching unit to Brazil. It extends from South Africa to India & onto to the Pacific and the US. The total length is greater than the Earth's circumference at approximately 50,000 kilometers. 2. Subsea cable projects are taking 3 to 5 years from initial idea to commercial service. 3. US traffic goes to Europe. It's aggregated with European originated traffic and then traverses the Mediterranean Sea to reach Egypt and takes terrestrial routes (Telecom Egypt) to the Red Sea. Then the traffic flows down the Red Sea. From there it either heads to India or bypasses it with Southeast Asia being the destination. 4. In the eyes of Facebook's subsea engineering team, the standard cable routing described above creates a host of problems. First of all , the Red Sea is a single point of failure. Same holds for Egypt. Secondly, the Mediterranean Sea requires many government permits as cables inevitably goes through ter...

First Point: The Portugal and Spanish grids are tightly integrated with limited power connector to the rest of Europe. Solar and wind play a big role and both power sources suffer from what is known as frequency instability. Solar and wind generated power is much more volatile than traditional power sources. Traditional power generators have angular momentum inertia. It takes a while to up or lower the power due to the inertia in the spinning components. A natural gas turbine takes a few minutes to spin up. A nuclear reactor an hour to lower or increase output by 10% (French reactors do load following). Solar and wind create very volatile power fluctuations that can easily trigger a circuit breaker. In an isolated grid if a circuit breaker is triggered, the power in the remaining active part of the grid increases. This triggers more circuit breakers and usually brings down the entire grid. 2. The consequence of the first point is that avoiding a repeat of the Iberian Penisula outage re...

BW Group purchased the Hawaiki cable in July, 2021 from the Hawaiki Submarine Cable Limited Partnership. The Partnership's original plan was to build a sister cable known as Hawaiki Nui (Great Hawaiki). BW, a Singapore company, has pursued this idea and finally signed earlier this year a Memorandum Of Understanding with TELIN, the international cable subsidiary of the Indonesian PTT. The MOU is really the partnership or consortium agreement and typically only happens once funding has been secured and all parties are fully onboard. The fact that Hawaiki Nui cable was announced in 2021 and just achieved the critical MOU milestone tells me that it has been very difficult to get this project off the ground. My speculation is that the cable's estimated cost is very high because it requires deep burial in the shallow waters of Indonesia; moreover, a very thorough and expensive marine survey is also necessary. Another challenge is that the cable's route requires Indonesi...

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...