Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Might close my first 100G into India today. 🙂 I recommend focusing for the next six months on the India/Singapore roiute as Red Sea construction of IEX, 2Africa, and SWM6 is on hold due to the possibility of missile strikes. In contrast, IAX and Mist do not face these issues. I understand that both Marseille and Singapore are essential peering points, but Marseille/Mumbai is likely to be hell for the foreseeable future. Put your incremental effort where it earns the greatest incremental return. Today is it is Mumbai or Chennai to Singapore. I am always available to provide your advice and guidance on your hunt for a Great Deal. 😃 

Bad news and also mildly bad news. AAE1 is down due to a fault in the Red Sea located between the Zafrana, Egypt and Saudi branching units. The outage began December 31st. Pearls 2Africa (depicted in the map) will go live near year's end, but it has only one fibre pair down the African East Coast from Oman to Kenya. China Mobile owns it.  The Big Picture is that the subsea cable world is facing a tough year. Right now Peace is the only high capacity cable live connecting Marseille to Singapore via the Red Sea. AAE1 is down. 2Africa, SWM6, Blue-Raman, and probably IEX cannot be completed due to the threat of Red Sea missile strikes. We can only hope that diplomacy results in safe passage for the cable ships. Otherwise persistent capacity shortages will only grow worse. I do expect AAE1 to be repaired within eight weeks as a cable ship can bypass Yemen via the Suez cable. But beware most cable ships are deploying new cables like Blue and Medusa. My guess is that the Indian owned cabl...

As you know, the Rubymar dragged its anchor for 31 kilometers after its crew abandoned it last spring. In so doing it severed the AAE1, Seacom/TGN, and Eassy cables. After several months stalemate, the Houthi rebels gave the consortiums permission to repair them as long as it was done in a low key fashion. The fact that AAE1 lands in Yemen gave the Houthis political cover with their supporters. But the reality is that since then the Houthis have refused to agree to refrain from targeting cable ships laying new systems like 2Africa, Blue-Raman, and SWM6. This is why these projects are currently well behind schedule. There is no way to complete them in the near future as designed. Probably the only way forward right now would be build terrestrially along side the Red Sea through Saudi Arabia. In other words, bypass that part of the Red Sea adjacnet to Yemen. For example, Oman could hand off Blue-Raman traffic to Saudi Arabia which could take it across the desert and essentially bypass th...

Venture capitalists have a poor infrastructure investment record. Their senior management typically has no startup telecom experience complemented by naive ideas that surging Internet traffic guarantees price stability. In addition, they have little idea of the operational challenge of creating a lean, mean sales machine that includes great customer experience and network performance. A really good company requires really good people. Digital 9's liquidation of its telecom infrastructure portfolio highlights a host of key issues. The portfolio includes the ailing Aquacomms cable network which Digital 9 is shopping. I speculate EXA will buy it as part of a wise strategy to consolidate the wholesale Trans-Atlantic market into a two carrier EXA/Telxius duopoly. Aquacomms was an attempt to double down on the Atlantic and Irish Sea routes despite glaring overcapacity that caused NYC/London 10Gs to fall from $38K in 2005 to $850-$1300 today. Yes, optical technology improved dramatically ...

 Firmina is a spatial division multiplexing 16 fibre pair cable with initial design capacity of 320 Tbps. It is named after a Brazilian abolitionist, Maria Firmina dos Reis, who was Brazil's first novelist. Google is the owner. Telxius has acquired a fibre pair on the system as part of a complex deal that involves providing landing and back haul in Brazil. Right now Google is selling fibre pair and spectrum capacity to recoup its capex. Cirion Technologies has also purchased a pair. Stonepeak Investments, an  infrastructure investor, purchased Lumen's South American assets which operate today as Cirion. Firmina is substantially complete, but no RFS announcement so far.  Distinguishing Features: 1. It is possible to power the entire cable from either the US or Brazilian landing stations in case the other CLS experiences a black out.  2. Firmina is the third South American hyperscaler subsea cable. Google is the owner of all three.  3. Firmina is the first spatial...

The planned Bulikala cable connects Google's modular prefabricated Guam CLS to Fiji. It is a part of a grand plan to dramatically increase Pacific subsea throughput and resiliency via a web of island hopping fibre optic cables. These small islands offer diverse network routing. They also offer power, which is the gating factor for throughput over long distances. Bulikala deployment is well underway with a branch recently landing on Tuvalu island, which has only satellite connectivity. The branch is a joint project of Google and the island's PTT. Most Pacific islands are poor due to limited resources, geographic isolation, and poor digital connectivity. They are also threatened by rising water due to global warming. Even the Hawaii island chain is relatively poor with Honolulu being surprisingly run down.  There is a mighty power play at work here. The US government provides aid to these islands sprinkled across the Pacific Ocean for their on-land digital infrastructure while Go...

The planned Bulikala cable connects Google's modular prefabricated Guam CLS to Fiji. The branch is right below Guam on the map at the bottom of this page. It is part of a large scale Google project costing a billion dollars  to dramatically increase Pacific subsea throughput and resiliency via a web of island hopping fibre optic cables. These small islands such as Fiji, Christmas Island, the Marshalls, and Polynesia offer diverse network routing that is particularly valuable in case of a subsea cable segment goes dark. They also offer power, which is the gating factor for throughput over long distances. All power conductors lead to voltage drawdown which limits bandwidth. Boosting power at intermediate points will allow higher transmission rates and lead to better return on the capital invested. The overall plan is to connect Japan, Guam, Hawaii, many islands such as Fiji and French Polynesia to the US in such a way as to increase both throughput via power stops at small islands a...

The telecom industry is gently nudging our fearful government leaders who think Russian incompetence has reached the point that they would use a Chinese cargo ship and its anchor for sabotage. I strongly urge the Russian intelligence to sue Western leaders for slandering their professional competency.  If Russia wanted to damage a subsea cable, they would use timer charges and the ship's crew would be a thousand miles away in Moscow drinking vodka and feasting on Beluga caviar when it exploded. Just like the Ukrainian special forces which probably blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline to ensure all Russian gas to Europe goes through the Ukraine. They rented a Russian ship which was over 800 kilometers away in international waters when the charges were triggered. See https://blog.telegeography.com/what-to-know-about-submarine-cable-breaks? for the full article. 

Sources tell me that the Iceland Iris cable was originally a Vodafone project that FARICE effectively highjacked. FARICE is a government-owned telecom incumbent with limited regulatory oversight due to legal loopholes. Indeed, Vodafone even built a data center in Reykjavik to serve as the cable landing station that the data center company Borealis eventually bought after Vodafone gave up on the subsea cable project. FARICE used its control of telecom infrastructure to block Vodafone. Here is the initial Vodafone project announcement: https://lnkd.in/d2aYnWnJ. Emerald was Vodafone's name for a high capacity cable project that would connect the US to Ireland and including an Iceland branch. After the branch was dropped, Aquacomms finished the project under the name of AEC-1. The projects reflects the insider nature of Icelandic society. Because Iceland has only 400,000 people competition in many industries is limited and everyone knows everyone and everything. For example, a handful...

Google is leading a project to create two new subsea cables collectively known as Australia Connect. Its partners include the entrepreneurial Subco , Vocus, and NextDC. Subco is a private operator of subsea cables. It owns the Oman-Australia cable and the SMAP cable that when finished will connect Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. Vocus is a competitive Australian carrier. I strongly suspect the Australian and US militaries are silent partners in the cable for reasons I outline below. The Bosun cable will link Darwin on Australia's Northern Coast to Christmas Island and then continue onward to Singapore. The Interlink cable connects Sydney to Perth and Perth up to Christmas Island. This project has military written all over it because Christmas Island could be used as a surveillance node for the US-Australian-Japanese military alliance. Equipped with radar the island can survey the the Southern approaches to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. The fact that the island is gett...

Both cables has been repaired, namely the one connecting Lithuania to Sweden and the C-Lion system as well. The emerging consensus within the European subsea cable community is that the German, Finnish, and Estonian authorities are wrong in claiming sabotage. Anchor dragging is a very crude form of sabotage and in this case the Chinese ship Li Peng crossed 13 cables and only damaged two. Secondly, a key requirement of sabotage is a safe get away. A heavy, slow cargo ship is not a good getaway car. Furthermore, the European press got it wrong when it claimed the ship captain is Russian. It is a Chinese ship with a Chinese captain. I have written an article explaining why the sabotage accusations are so flimsy in my opinion: https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/11/american-officials-say-no-sabotage-in.html. The ship dragged its anchor probably to steady itself in bad weather and turned off the transponder because the captain knew what it was doing was irresponsible. I suspect the l...

A subsea cable is like a long piece of string. Except the world's cables total about 1.5 million kilometers. Anything shaped like that is inherently indefensible. The Big Huff and Puff is that if we place sensors on or near the cables, presto, problem solved. Not a chance. All it takes is a technologically sophisticated and patient adversary to send out unmanned drones to locate the cables in deep sea where they lie exposed on the ocean's floor. Record the coordinates or drop a homing beacon. When the war is about to go from cold to hot, release underwater drones with charges to attach themselves to these cables and blow them up.  Sensors are of limited value because no country or military alliance has sufficient vessels to station them close enough to every point of possible attack. What is the point of a warning if it is too late to avert the attack? The invention of radar did not stop air strikes or render air power useless. Satellites can give 30 minutes warning of a nuclea...

With the exception of 2Africa, which has two landings one of which is 500 kilometers South of Lagos, all Nigerian landings are along a 25 kilometer wide beach in an area called Lekki. I expect 2Africa and Equiano to dominate the transport market going forward with 2Africa finally live in February or early March. At that point I expect combined capacity of these two modern cables to push prices into the teens for 100G waves. The older subsea cables like WACS, ACE, MainOne, SAT3, and GLO-1 will struggle to compete because their per bit costs are much higher. These older cables have far less capacity, but similar operating expenses similar to 2Africa or Equiano. For example, the older cables probably pay as much if not more for maintenance given their higher fault frequency. They are more likely to experience outages due to shallower burial and riskier routing through the blue ocean than either Equiano or 2Africa. Inferior service, higher costs. Not a recipe for success.  Unlike thei...

 1. The West African 2Africa cable segment extending from South Africa to Portugal should be live late February or early March. Excellent opportunity to diversify your network while reducing overall costs. Unfortunately, not clear when the Kenya/Marseille route via the Red Sea will be ready. Many buyers are currently riding Equiano single threaded or pairing it up with older, much more expensive and outage-prone cables like WACS, MainOne or Glo-1. Between Lisbon/Lagos, Lagos/SA, and Lisbon/SA, 2Africa 100Gs should vary from the upper teens to lower twenties per month on 3 year contracts. Like Equiano, 2Africa is buried deeper than the legacy subsea networks while avoiding the danger spots like the Congo Canyon or its Ivory Coast counterpart, Le Trou Sans Fin. For countries like Ivory Coast I expect carriers to initially hold the line at $35K MRC on 3 year deals, but I expect pricing discipline will disintegrate with pricing headed into the mid-twenties.  There is no reason to ...

CNN reports that two American government officials say the most likely explanation for the outages is simply irresponsible behavior in the form of a Chinese cargo ship dragging its anchor. This contrasts sharply with German and Finnish officials who have insisted on sabotage. My own take is that the Americans are right. Nothing about the sabotage hypothesis is convincing.  There is no recorded incident of state sabotage of subsea cables since WWII's end.  Fishing boats and cargo ships dragging their anchors are responsible for approximately 70% of outages with the balance due to events such as debris slides in subsea canyon, loss of power, subsea earthquakes causing mudslides, etc. Historical data provides no examples of state targeting of subsea fibre optic infrastructure.  Most subsea cables are buried 1 to 2 meters deep to prevent damage. So locating them is difficult even for cable repair ships. Repair of the subsea cable SWM5 was delayed several weeks because the shi...

"Two subsea cables located in the Baltic Sea have recently reported faults. BCS East-West cable reportedly experienced a fault at 08:00 on Sunday 17th November and the C-Lion cable reportedly experienced a fault at 02:00 on Monday 18th November (times UTC).  There has been speculation and opinion shared on social media and from news outlets as to the causes of these two subsea cable faults. Many commentators have pointed towards deliberate action. However, at this stage there is no evidence to make any conclusive statement. Particularly since the Nord Stream Pipeline was damaged in 2022, the security of critical undersea infrastructure has been a central topic of discussion, and action, for both industry and government. For these and future incidents it is prudent to consider the following: -       The primary causes of cable damage in Northern European waters are commercial fishing or ship anchors, with a smaller proportion of faults...

Southern Cross subsea cable system is implementing ODUflex, which is a relatively new ITU standard that allows granular Layer 1 bandwidth. No longer are we limited to 100G, 400G, and 800G for either subsea or terrestrial networks. Interestingly enough, Hauwei proposed the new standard and was its primary champion. All wavelengths consist of optical containers and ODUflex allows optical containers to be stacked at 1.25 Gps intervals. So you can lease 1.25 Gbps wavelength up to 400G in 1.25 Gbps increments. Note that port sizes are still 10G, 100G, 400G or 800G. So to access a 150G transmission rate the customer needs 400G intefaces. Ciena is one of the the vendors to implement ODUflex along with Hauwei. More details here: https://lnkd.in/dZvNbubc. It is worth noting that granular bandwidth is being implemented on the newer cables which Southern Cross owns like Next.  The commercial motivation is poor take up of 400G wavelengths. The only real customers for 400Gs are very big bandwi...

Google's Firmina cable is a 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable that connects its Myrtle Beach CLS in South Carolina to Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina. Firmina was one of Brazil's first notable writers and novelists. The cable is on the verge of RFS with the wet segments done and the focus on securing back haul, equipment installation, and testing. Design capacity is 240 Tbps. The cable is open. This means each fibre pair or spectrum owner selects the Layer 1 technology vendor such as Ciena or Infinera. Hence Firmina is technology agnostic. This reflects the fact that subsea optical amplifiers are compatible with all DWDM manufacturers and hence there is no compelling reason for capacity owners to chose the same terminal equipment. The main reason for doing so was the consortium model where a single operating entity was created to manage the physical assets on behalf of the members. But this model lead to conservative, status quo decision making. Google and the ot...

Several data centre companies have asked for my thoughts on potential data centre sites that could exploit nearby subsea cable landings. Obviously there is a need for a new data centre in Marseille diverse to the Interxion sites. In fact, Telehouse Europe has such a plan, already has purchased a plot of land, and has LOIs from long haul carriers to bring it online. Quadrivium is retrofitting a former corporate data facility in Genoa to leverage 2Africa, Blue Raman, and the other cables that call it their home.  Trieste is my nomination for a future cable landing station and Internet gateway. The city has a large port that could easily accommodate subsea cables. Furthermore, the latency of an intercontinental subsea network landing in Trieste and delivering traffic to Milano, Zurich, Vienna, and Frankfurt is definitely lower than routing via Marseille and even Genoa. So Trieste offers diversity without a latency penalty for central Europe and Scandinavia.  Trieste was a great p...

Funke Opeke, the CEO and founder of MainOne, resigned after selling her firm to Equinix for $320 million. MainOne was one of the first carrier neutral data centre companies in Nigeria and its MDXI facility is almost a must-have for ISPs. MainOne began life as a subsea cable company. At some point Opeke realized that carrier neutral data centers was an attractive business due to high occupancy rates and significant customer switching costs. Moreover, since African data centers often lack good connectivity, the MainOne cable was an excellent complement to any data center facility. MainOne just opened a new facility in Ghana, one of Africa's bright spots in terms of political culture, economic development, and pluralism. Click on this for more details https://thetechcapital.com/funke-opeke-resigns-as-ceo-of-mainone-following-320m-equinix-deal/. I guess I am too woke for the old telecom guard who have often expressed me to the idea that appointing women as senior managers is '...