Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Outage started 36 hours ago. No information available other than customers are reporting no data passing their links. If you need Australia connected to Singapore, it is possible to create a protect path via Guam. But it will not be cheap.

1. Capacity shortages will develop within 2 years because Equiano and 2Africa are insufficient given the vast number of countries they serve. Only South Africa and Nigeria have adequate capacity. But for many countries 2Africa is the only truly modern and reliable system with good long haul pricing and reasonable cross connect fees. Now 2Africa is 180 Tbps, but serves at least 30 countries in total. Even if we exclude the Pearls component, we are looking at Egypt, Italy, France, Portugal, UK, Sudan, Djibouti, Kenya, Somalia, Seychelles, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, South Africa, Angola, the two Congos, Gabon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Senegal, Togo, and Senegal. I count 27 in the core African network. Divide by 180/27=6.7 Tbps. Capacity shortages are almost guaranteed particularly given some migration from the older, less reliable systems with their high cross connect charges to 2Africa and Equiano. One factor that may alleviate stress on the telecom...

The Pacific and Southeast Asia have two major telecom hubs: Tokyo and Singapore. Tokyo's status reflects its importance as the capital of one of Asia's largest economies with huge trade and financial flows with the United States as well as a defense treaty. Tokyo dominates Japan like Paris does France. Singapore's emergence reflects Hong Kong's downfall due to the Chinese government's failure to honor its commitment to HK autonomy. China requires any political candidate for HK office to be approved by it. Hence every HK politician is de facto a Beijing puppet. Secondly, China's security laws allow the arrest of anyone criticizing the Chinese government. The collapse of HK's rule of law is illustrated by numerous arrests of anyone peacefully opposing the government. You can go to jail for wearing a T-shirt advocating HK independence. In contrast, Singapore is neutral in the geopolitical war between the US and China and its judges are independen...

A good Tech Capital article on the new wave of American Tech Giant cables in Asia:  https://thetechcapital.com/subsea-shake-up-how-new-cables-are-wiring-southeast-asias-ai-era/. My list of the most important new cables: 1. Apricot is a 12 fibre pair Southeast Asian cable with throughput of 290 Terabits. It bypasses China, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea in a clear signal to the Chinese government to get lost. Google and META are consortium members. 2. Echo is a 12 fibre pair Pacific cable directly linking Singapore to the United States. It has 144 Tbps throughput. Google and Facebook are equal partners in the project. The lower throughput reflects the 20,000 kilometer length of the cable. Same holds true for Bifrost. 3. Bifrost is the sister cable linking Singapore to the US. Its digital horse power is 180 Tbps. 4. Waterworth is a 480 Tbps behemoth with 24 fibre pairs. We still don't know the exact landing points in Asia. It will land on both the West and East coasts ...

GNC is Guam's main carrier neutral data center. It doubles as a cable landing station. Usable colo space is 650 square meters. It has access to 2 megawatts. Guam's main energy source is diesel. A couple cables house their network equipment at the facility, including the Japan-Guam-Australia North and South networks (Google). The main problem for carriers considering Guam is that the PTT controls metro connectivity between the cable landing stations and data centers. The incumbent TeleGuam is a problem because it charges 10 to 20 times the kilometer rate as in developed Western cities like Amsterdam. A 100G metro wave ranges from $5K to $8K per month. That is more than 20% the cost of 100G waves from Singapore to Guam. One can get a dark fibre pair between Amsterdam data centres for 300 to 400 Euros a month. Guam offers the Pacific something it badly needs, a third telecom hub. Not an important place for peering, but ...

As most of you know, Google is building a subsea cable ring between Christmas Island and Australia. I speculated last week that Christmas Island might be where the planned South Africa to Australia Umoja cable would land. It turns out that the new cable, Dhivaru, will connect the new rising Middle East subsea cable hub of Oman to Christmas Island with a stop in the Maldives. The term 'dhivaru' refers to the rope used to control the sail on traditional Maldivian ships. So the Google plan is quite clear. Google is creating an Indian Ocean subsea cable ring connecting Africa to Australia via Umoja and the Middle East to Australia via Dhivaru and the Bosun cable linking Christmas Island to Darwin. I think that all these Google cables will be 16 or 24 fibre pairs pairs. Certainly not less than 16, but not exceeding 24, as traffic cannot justify it. At first glance there are losers and scorned parties. None of these cables land in India, which might reflect India's subsea cable r...

Tabua is part of Google's grand Pacific Initiative, a project to build a mesh-like web of subsea cables connecting Japan, the US, Australia, and many Pacific islands. The islands include Guam, Fiji, Hawaii, and French Polynesia. These islands play a crucial role: they provide power to keep throughput at higher levels than otherwise possible. Another key role for the islands is as telecom switching hubs with each cable landing station serving several high capacity cables.  Tabua is a standard 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable with two branches landing on the Australian and American sides. Design throughput is 17 Tbps per fibre pair. This dual branch approach has become popular because if the Queensland branch is damaged, traffic can be switched to the New Wales CLS with fibre linking the two cable landing stations. Similarly, on the US side, it lands in Hawaii and also Los Angeles. If the Hawaii/LA segment fails, then the traffic can be routed via other cables landin...

- 2Africa is much more expensive than Equiano. The 2Africa 100G pricing is $25K and above excluding tails for Lisbon to Lagos. In contrast, Equiano 100G pricing is below $20K now. Similarly, Equiano 10G pricing gravitates around $5K versus $10K on the same route for 2Africa.  The reason for this disparity is that the 144 Tbps Equiano cable primarily serves South Africa, Portugal, and Nigeria. In contrast, the 180 Tbps 2Africa network serves over 30 countries and Facebook kept 4 of the 16 pairs for itself. Note that the 2Africa map does not include the Pearls extension of 2Africa to the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, and Mumbai.  Another sign of the impending capacity crunch is the unwillingness of 2Africa consortium members to sell IRUs. An IRU is a long term capacity sale ranging typically dffrom 10 years to life of system. Carriers will not sell IRUs if they expect future capacity shortages or think they are likely. Many of these carriers have transit backbones that they must keep ...

Google's Bosun cable will connect Christmas Island, located in the East Indian Ocean, to Darwin, Australia, site of a large military base with rotating contingents of Japanese and American soldiers. The project was announced near the end of 2024. At the time it struck me as a bit strange. Google's new cables across the Pacific will do a lot of island hopping. This allows the power to be boosted, the islands can serve as traffic switching centers if they are hosting multiple cables, and complete OEO regeneration can be done. Voltage drops as electricity flows through the copper or aluminum current conductor. So the advantage of powering a cable at intermediate points is clear. It enables higher end-to-end transmission throughput. A key aspect of Google's Pacific projects is better resiliency. The easiest way to do that is a put a small prefabricated modular CLS on an island and land multiple cables there. There Layer 3 switching can divert traffic in case a ca...

A point: TY3. Z point: 2905 Diehl Road, Aurora Illinois. Service: 10G Wave (Layer 1). Subsea Cable: Topaz. MRC: $11,999. NRC: $1250. Term: 1 Year.

Most financial traders rely on the PC-1 or Topaz subsea cables to move market data and orders between the Japanese Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But all subsea cables eventually experience outages. Highly diverse, yet low latency protect path using new Juno network. Layer 10G pricing is great. A-end address: Tokyo Equinix TY3 Z-end address: CME Aurora data centre. Bandwidth: Linear 10G (unprotected). RTD: 122ms or lower. 12M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 8,000 24M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 7,800 36M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 7,650

1. ASE; 100G Wave; Tokyo/Singapore; $19K MRC; 2 Years. 2. AAE1; 10G Wave; Marseille/Singapore; $3,500 MRC; 3 Years. 3. Juno; 100G Wave; Tokyo/LA; $16,461 MRC; 3 Years. 4. ADC; 100G Wave; HK/Singapore; $12.3K MRC; 3 Years. 5. Faster; 100G Wave; TY2/Coresite LA; $18.2k MRC; 3 Years.

 Capacity: 100G (PEACE) A-End: Mombasa B-End: Marseilles Term: 24 Month MRC: $40,500 NRC: $ 15,000

Author: Dmitry Kovsh. Subcom employee. Presentation Available Upon Request. In his presentation Dmitry focused on designing wet plant for open cable systems. Wet plant is everything in the water up to the beach manhole. The main components are the fibre optic cable and optical amplifiers. I define an open cable system as one where capacity owners manage individually their capacity. This business model involves capacity allocation by fibre pair or a percentage of a fibre pair's spectrum. Big capacity owners own one or more fibre pairs. Smaller players own spectrum called either a quarter fibre pair or half fibre pair. As the name suggests, a quarter fibre pair means the owner has exclusive right to use 25% of the fibre pair's usable spectrum. Similarly for a half fibre pair. Spectrum ownership means the cable delivers usable spectrum on a fibre pair defined by upper and lower frequency limits. The spectrum lying in the frequency range belongs to the owner for the te...

The eight fibre pair ADC system went live in November of last year. Its design capacity is slightly above 160 Tbps. Consortium members and large capacity owners include China Telecom, China Unicom, PLDT (the Philippine incumbent), Singtel, Softbank, TATA, and Vietel. TATA owns a fibre pair marketed under its own brand, TGN-IA2. NEC built the Asia Direct Cable. ADC 100G pricing for the Singapore to Tokyo route varies from $13.5K to $18.5K MRC on three year contracts. If you wish to avoid Chinese carriers, yet enjoy competitive pricing, TATA is a good choice. By a Chinese carrier I mean a network licensed to operate in mainland China and hence subject to its national security laws. These laws dictate that Chinese operators must cooperate with Chinese national security agencies. That's a big problem. In contrast, as just one example, Apple refused to cooperate with the FBI on unlocking a phone in an investigation. So there is a clear difference between China and the Wes...

META has started selecting landing sites. As the map below shows, the subsea cable's routing is unique, a record breaking 50,000 kilometers in length, and it will form a ring around the world. A ring allows Facebook to reroute traffic in the opposite direction if there is a fault. Waterworth is a 24 fibre pair system. That puts at the top of the fiber pair count for spatial division multiplexing systems. So figure a design transmission rate of a half petabit per second.  Although crazy news outlets have reported it will cost $10 billion, that figure is absurd. The project can easily be done for $2 billion or less even with extensive terrestrial trenching to create new and unique fibre routes. Will the project use new technologies like multicore fibre or multiband spectrum? Doubtful. The price tag dictates the META subsea cable design team will use standard proven technology. No one wants to tell their boss they just wasted $1.5 billion dollars. It is not good for your career. 😃 Wa...

Three industry insiders have confirmed the 'epicenter' of the outages is in Yemen coastal waters at a depth of only one 100 meters. This strongly suggests fishing or more likely an anchor is responsible. Multiple sources have told me that neither Egyptian or Saudi Internet services has been degraded, but the Persian Gulf has been hit hard as well as Pakistan. This is consistent with the epicenter being off Yemen. It is also consistent with the cables reported down below. Four Cables Definitely Down: 1. EIG. 2. SWM4. 3. IMEWE. 4. Falcon Lower left map is SMW4. Center is EIG. Far right is IMEWE. Total capacity of these four cables is approximately 44 Tbps. Pakistan is heavily dependent on SWM4, EIG, and IMEWE. Scattered reports initially suggest AAE1 may also be down. But it is not.

Microsoft has warned Azure customers of degradation in Internet performance due to "multiple outages in the Red Sea". Both IMEWE and SWM4 appear to be down near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A subsea cable customer has told me that EIG, AAE1, and Falcon are also down or at the bare minimum damaged. Internet latency has risen in the UAE and Pakistan. Please do not speculate about saborage. It is irresponsible as Ockham's Razor applies in this situation. Ockham was a Medieval European philosopher who argued that the simplest explanation that accounts for the fact is the most plausible. It has become a bedrock principle of science. Conspiracy theoriest which include a lot of so-called national security experts routinely violate the principle in their quest for $500 an hour consulting gigs. Multiple simultaneous outages suggest a common cause such as anchor dragging As you can see, Jeddah is effectively a single point of failure for subsea networks. Cables landing at Jeddah include A...

ASE is one of the lowest latency cables serving the Asia Financial Triangle of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. Offer requires a one year contract. 

AAE1; $21.5K MRC; Two Year Term. Peace; $17.5K MRC; One Year Term. A points: MRS2. Z points: SG1/SG3. Customer responsible for cross connects.