Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Turkey has bee a very tough market for global ISPs. Until EXA lit terrestrial fibre a few years ago across the Bulgaria's border with Turkey, 100G pricing was $15K per month and above. EXA now dominates the key Frankfurt to Istanbul route with lower pricing. But the situation is not ideal. Physical diversity is an illusion across the narrow border with one conduit system carrying much of the international traffic. Sparkle's old Mednautilus system does provide an alternative to the land routes, but it's primacy has been too high for foreign ISPs in Turkey to flourish. Sparkle has signed a memorandum of understanding with Turkcell to build a subsea cable that will land in the Instanbul suburd of Izmir and at Chania, Greece. The yet unnamed cable will interconnect at Chania, a Greek island, to the BlueMed cable which will carry the traffic to Marseille, Milano, and other key telecom hubs. We have few details on the cable itself other than a target design throughp...

Facebook is building a six fibre pair cable directly connecting Taiwan to the the United States with landings at Toucheng, Taiwan, Hermosa Beach, California, and Manchester, California. RFS is 2Q2027. The Hermosa Beach CLS is the well known facility built by RTI Holdings before its bankruptcy. In the submarine cable landing license application, Facebook noted that its motivation was the fact that US-Taiwanese traffic is growing rapidly each year. Due to the 12,000 kilometer length of the cable and the absence of any island landings for power, the design throughput per pair is a relatively low 12.8 Tbps or 76.8 Tbps aggregate initial capacity.  ORCA is an open cable so each fibre pair owner will operate and control its own submarine line terminating equipment with only power being under collective control. Since Facebook is the cable's sole initial owner, the open architecture suggests it will sell capacity on the system to third parties to recoup capital expenditures and share comm...

Amazon Ireland has applied for a maritime usage license to land a planned cable connecting Ireland to the United States. It is considering landing the cable near Castlefreke on Ireland's Southeast Coast in County Cork along a stretch of beach called the Strand. Amazon has made no public announcement so far. Here is the filed application . I discovered this when I came across a local Irish newspaper that mentioned that Amazon was looking at a nearby beach for a cable landing. I then did a Google search and found the filing. All these filings are posted online and they are 'leading indicators' as economists would say of what is going to happen.  No Trans-Atlantic subsea cables currently land on Ireland's South Coast other than EXA's Express and that is part of the reason that Amazon finds it so appealing. Such a cable would be physically diverse at least on the terrestrial side to the Irish Sea and older Atlantic cables like Hibernia North and South and AC1. I can nev...

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...

C-Lion Cable Down In Baltic Sea C-Lion is an 8 fibre pair high capacity linear cable that went live in 2016. Transmission rate is 144 Tbps. The cable connects Helsinki data centers to Frankfurt via a cable traversing the Baltic Sea. C-Lion lands at Rostock, Germany, and at Helsinki. The Finnish government financed, owns, and operates the subsea network in the national interest. One goal of the project was to reduce network dependence on third country transit via Sweden or the Baltics. Another was to provide enough capacity to grow the Finnish data center market.  Finland offers many advantages for large data centers. Its cool climate dramatically lowers cooling costs as well as extending server life spans. There is also attractively priced, reliable, and abundant power in the form of hydro, nuclear, and wind. I think the large Google data center in Hamina, Finland opened the government's eyes to the economic potential that subsea capacity unlocks. Indeed, Google announced just a fe...

Telecom Egypt and Mobily are cooperating on a new subsea cable connecting Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Telecom Egypt is a PTT whereas Mobily is a competitive Saudi Arabian mobile operator. Few details regarding the project are available. Mobily is financing the project whereas TE is the cable landing partner. This project reflects a broad trend where competitive mobile providers are becoming more involved in connecting Middle Eastern countries both to reduce their own costs and also create strategic alliances. In fact, Mobily is following the same game plan as the much larger Vodafone and Bharti Airtel. As mobile voice and data traffic becomes increasingly international, mobile providers acquire more international capacity and often the wholesale market. Typically, they buy more than they need themselves because bigger purchases lower per bit costs. Then they sell the excess capacity in the wholesale market. This is how Bharti entered the wholesale telecom market. Most likely this new cabl...

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...

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 in...

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 f...

Meta's Anjana cable sets an Atlantic bandwidth record with 24 fibre pairs each transmitting 20 terabits per second for a total of nearly a half petabit. This huge capacity reflects its spatial division multiplexing (SDM) design. Traditional subsea cable designs maximize capacity per pair, but this leads to nonlinear signal distortions once a threshold is exceeded. Hence additional power to boost the rate above the threshold yields only small gains. This inefficient use of power limits fiber pair counts to 8 or less per cable with most cables rarely exceeding 150 Tbps. In contast, SDM increases the total bandwidth punch by operating each pair at lower transmission rates to avoid these nonlinear signal distortions. In turn, the lower transmission rates free up power to support enough more pairs to sharply raise total cable throughput, which ranges from 200 Tbps to a half petabit per second.  Another notable feature of Anjana is that it lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Santa...

 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 s...

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 i...

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...

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 t...

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 ...

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 ...

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...