Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

I n 2005 there were 7 high c apacity Trans- Atl antic subsea fibre optic networks connecting North  Americ a to Europe. Flag had two cables, Hibernia  Atl antic two as well, Level3 owned the Yellow cable, Global Crossing had  AC1, the PTTs owned TAT-14,  and  Apollo h ad two. In most cases the cables landed in either Ireland or the UK with most traffic destined for downtown London telecom hotels like the various partitions of Telehouse London (East & North at that time). London was Europe's key telecom hub. The other two important hubs were Frankfurt and  Amsterd am.  At the time Teli a Carrier was buying 10G waves 60 Hudson to Telehouse East for $38K a month. But that did not last long.  There was chronic excess capacity due to zombie subsea cables. In most industries if rates of return are depressed, firms exit the industry with their assets sold to be used in other sectors. Consequently, the industry produces less and prices rise pushing up cash flow margins. Not so in tel

EXA has emerged as the dominant player on the Atlantic routes. Its original subsea network consisted of the the highly diverse North and South Hibernia cables complemented by the much faster and younger Express cable.  North EXA cable was RFS 2001. It connects London & New York via landings highly diverse to its competitors. North lands in Canada at Halifax and at Southport, UK. In contrast, most Atlantic cables land near New York City and in Cornwall near Bude. North's diversity makes it an excellent choice for network planners focusing on resiliency. Obviously, the cable's latency is high, but that is generally the tradeoff one must accept to achieve physical diversity. I think the RTD 60 Hudson/Telehouse London is probably 76 ms. dfs South EXA cable was also RFS 2001. It lands at the same CLS as North on both sides of the Atlantic. I believe the latency is slightly higher.  Express was built much later (RFS 2015). It is designed to be the lowest latency path from LD4 Slo

 Anjana - The New Atlantic Leviathan Meta's Anjana cable will set a new record for Atlantic bandwidth with 24 fibre pairs each operating at 20 terabits for a total of 480 Tbps. It goes without saying that the cable is a spatial division multiplexing design. There has been a steady move South for new US cable landings over the last 15 years; Anjana is no exception. Around 2000 all Trans-Atlantic networks landed near New York or Boston. Then Marea and Dunant landed at Virginia Beach so they could directly link to Ashburn Equinix at the lowest possible latency as well as avoid 'hot spots' like New York. Now Anjana will land at Mrytle Beach, South Carolina. The farthest point South for a Atlantic cable connecting Europe and North America. See the CLS and beach manhole below. In Europe Anjana will land on Spain's North Coast at the new Telxius CLS in the city of Santander. Resiliency is the name of the game in the subsea cable world. That means physical diversity.  Meta has

 Dubious EU Funded Submarine Projects - Polar Connect. The EU embodies activist government. It is seeding a large number of digital infrastructure projects many of which have only a small chance of success. My nomination for the most dubious EU-backed subsea cable initiative is Polar Connect. The idea is to connect Europe to Asia via a subsea cable that is deployed directly under the polar cap to link Japan to Europe. The backers of this plan include NorduNet, the Swedish Research Council, and others. EU has committed 5.6 million Euros to the project over three years for initial design and research.  This project takes advantage of the EU's lack of submarine cable expertise and its perennial itch to intervene in capitalism in the belief that it has the wisdom to improve it. NorduNet has unscrupulously been tossing out capex estimates of under $250 million. This is absurd. Such a project would require a specialized cable ship plus two icebreakers. And there would have to be a sea ma

The IAX cable links Chennai and Mumbai to Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Jio Reliance and China Mobile are the primary consortium members but press releases suggest there is a silent digital giant partner as well. An educated guess would be Google, Microsoft or Facebook. Information is scarce on the system. It will likely be 16 pairs like its IEX counterpart. This suggests that design capacity will easily exceed 200 Tbps. India desperately more bandwidth, but given Jio's leading role it is not clear it will lower Layer 1 pricing. On the flip side, China Mobile would be unlikely to participate in a project unless it could provide end-to-end connectivity to its customers. So I believe modest optimism is the correct frame of mind. 

Lisbon/Lagos is 77 ms RTD. My best estimate to date.  Shortest latency of all subsea cables between Lisbon and South Africa: 130 ms RTD. Also the most reliable and least expensive. Equiano lands not just in Portugal, Nigeria, and South Africa, but also Togo and Namibia. Any sufficiently large ISP in those four African countries should be on the system. Feel free to ping me for a quote. ☺ Deepest buried African subsea cable: averages 2 meters.

Equiano is a Google cable. A 12 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing system designed to do at least 12 Tbps per pair. This cable is a must-have for African ISPs as it connects the three key telecom hubs of Portugal (Lisbon Equinix (LS1)), Nigeria (the Open Access Data Center (OADC) in Lagos), and South Africa (Capetown Teraco (CT1) in South Africa), has massive capacity and is vastly more reliable than older African cables.  Equiano not only connects the key telecom hubs essential to West Africa's Internet, but is also buried two meters deep and avoids the dangerous undersea areas like the Congo canyon and Le Trou Sans Fin that have caused many subsea outages. Le Trou experienced a debris slide this Spring that caused 4 African cables (SAT3, Mainone, WACS, and ACE) to be severed in the Ivory Coast's territorial waters. Equiano saved West Africa's Internet from a complete subsequent meltdown as its capacity was used to reroute traffic to Lisbon or South Africa. Equiano&#

Transmission Co is a new Lagos metro network with fibre between the three key data centers of OADC, Rack Centre, and MDXI Equinix. It is currently expanding into another three sites. This network is amplified in order to ensure high performance for 400G and 800G wavelengths. We can offer you metro wavelengths between these three data on-net facilities configured as a ring at excellent pricing with significant term and volume discounts. Also available are spectrum and alien waves. Mark Tinka, former head of Seacom engineering, is the founder and CEO. I work directly with him on sales opportunities. Mark is well known and respected in the Internet engineering community. We can be reached at roderick.beck@networksourcing.net.  The best way to think about spectrum is that it is a virtual fibre pair. If you take 100 Gigahertz on the network, then you feed it into your DWDM gear and carve it up and frame as OTN circuits. In this case you can get a 400G wavelength or several 100G waves if yo

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

Type of Cable System: Repeated Two-Core Fibre Pairs With Coherent Optics  Consortium Members: Independent Operator. Construction Status: Design and Fund Raising Stage.  Number of Fibre Pairs: 48.  Number of Cores Per Fibre: 2. Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2027. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 13 Pbps.  Salient Features: 48 Pair repeatered cable directly linking UK, Norway, Demark, Germany, and Netherlands. Every fibre optic path is direct and involves no third country transit. Each fibre pair strand has two optical cores instead of the standard one.  Supplier: NEC. Only NEC offers multicore fibre strands and 48 pair repeaters.  I interviewed today one of the project's founders, Eckhard Bruckshen. The IOEMA cable is designed to reduce the dependence of European telecommunications traffic on the Denmark bottleneck as the map below illustrates. Today Denmark is the primary telecom bridge between the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland (also the Baltic States) and the re

Type of Cable System: Spatial Division Multiplexing.  Consortium Members: Amazon, Facebook, Keppel, and Telin. Construction Status: Behind schedule due to permitting delays for Indonesian waters.  Number of Fibre Pairs: Main trunk has 12. Some branches have 6.  Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2025. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 125 Tbps.  Salient Features: First low latency, three digit terabit cable between Singapore and USA.  Bifrost is the name of the burning rainbow bridge that connects Earth to the Realm of the Gods in Norse mythology. This new 12 fibre pair system is a wide lane digital bridge between Southeast Asia and North America (lands in the US and Mexico). It is the first direct single subsea cable solution connecting Singapore, Indonesia, and Philippines to North America that does not touch China or Hong Kong. The key consortium members include Facebook, Telin, Keppel (a new subsea player providing the Singapore landing), and Amazon. Singtel has some lit capacity on the

The Andromeda cable will link Greece, Cyprus, and Israel with cable landing stations at Korakia, Greece, and Tirat Carmel, Israel. The plan is to extend the subsea cable across Israel to the important Aqaba, Jordan, and Haqi, Saudi Arabia data centers. Apparently via the existing oil pipeline that transports oil from the Red Sea to Israel. This Israel cooperation with Arab countries reflects the ongoing rapprochement between the former enemies. Andromeda, if built, will provide much needed physical diversity and cost savings by bypassing Egypt, which most Europe-Asia cables use despite Telecom Egypt's very high transit fees.  Tamares Telecom owns the Tamares North cable connecting Israel with Cyprus and I believe that Andromeda will take this existing subsea infrastructure and extend it to Greece. However, it is worth noting that neither Tamares Telecom nor its Greek partner Grid Telecom (the wholesale subsidiary of a Greek power transmission company) have announced a subsea constr

Besides Scylla  and Zeus , Crosslake's CrossChannel is the only other new English Channel cable built in the last 20 years. There was a 1998-2002 subsea construction boom and in wake of the subsequent capacity glut affecting the Atlantic and Europe, all further building ceased until the last 5 years. Scylla and CrossChannel are similar in many respects : unrepeatered 96 fibre pair double armoured cables owned by private operators as opposed to consortiums and both backed by infrastructure funds. The consortium model is less common in North America and Europe because there are fewer barriers to entry such as monopoly or semi-deregulated telecom markets. So including the incumbents in order to facilitate landing a subsea cable is unnecessary. It is interesting that all three cables are unrepeatered. Prior to their construction, most or all of the English Channel cables were low fibre count, repeatered networks. I suspect improvements in fibre purity and more importantly coherent opti

If you can take it at the Chikura and Bandon CLS, MRC is $13.5K per 100G. From TY4 to 1 Wilshire pricing is $17.5K MRC. Good deal.