Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

A consortium consisting of TATA Communications, Lightstorm, Microsoft, and Singtel just announced a new 16 fibre pair subsea network tailored to serve the AI data center markets in Hyderabad, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. It includes two Indian landings, one in Southern Chennai and another at Machilipatnum, the latter being the shortest path to Hyderabad. Both Hyderabad and Lumpur host large numbers of data centers equipped with GPUs for rent to estimate AI large language models. Conversely, Singapore is a distribution point for estimated AI models. What is sometimes called AI inference. Both space and power in the city state are too limited and expensive for AI model estimation. Besides the Singapore and Indian landings, there will likely be a cable branch landing in the Malaysian province of Selangor, chosen because it is the shortest way to reach Kuala Lumpur. Public information on the new system is sparse, but it is also likely that cable will include be extended to Hyderabad and Ch...

A turbidity current is the likely culprit for the WACS trunk outage. The same holds true for the 2Africa Ivory Coast branch failure. The Taiwan earthquake of December 2006 is instructive in this regard. The 22 knocked out cables failed in sequence over the course of several hours. So the sheer force of the earthquake was not responsible. Instead, the seismic event caused sediment to begin moving down the undersea slope of Taiwan's continental shelf. This was not a gentle slope, but rather the steep sides of the Kaoping subsea canyon, which is 4 kilometers deep. As the chart shows, cables went dark in sequence radiating from the epicenter outward as this undersea tidal wave traveled down the sides of the subsea canyon. The turbidity current traveled at speeds ranging from 3.7 meters per second to 5.7 meters (roughly 20 kilometers per hour). The sequence of events suggests there were at least 2 and probably turbidity currents involved.  It is probably not a coincidence ...

ISPs in Ghana are reporting their 2Africa waves are up and running. So 2Africa's main trunk appears untouched. Hence the Cote d'Ivoire outage must be due to a branching segment fault. It is thought a turbidity wave caused the damage. This is a powerful surge of water, debris, and mud that can wash away the sediment covering buried cables and snap them like toothpicks. I call it an underwater Tsunami. It is triggered by an undersea avalanche due to an earthquake or a flooding river like the Congo pouring into the Atlantic. For example, the 2006 Taiwanese earthquake caused a turbidity current that tore apart 22 cables off the country's Southeast coast. This current traveled several hundred kilometers and reached speeds as high as 72 kilometers an hour. It is not clear what caused the turbidity surge off Abidjan. What we do know is that there is a large subterranean cavern, Le Trou Sans Fond, at Abidjan's doorstep. It was likely involved.  The last few days Cote d'Ivoi...

Abidjan clients on WACS report an outage began 4 AM local time today. Outage began with a severe drop of 385 volts. Investigation shows the fault lies in segment S3C between the first and second repeater on the Ivory Coast branching unit. So the outage should only affect Cote d'Ivoire. A ship has been dispatched to fix it. Two years ago four cables were severed off Abidjan due to a debris slide in the subterranean cavern known as Le Trou Sans Fond. Also a 2Africa outage started 1:30 PM Abidjan time. More information will be provided as it becomes available. First map below is 2Africa. Second is WACS. 

The standard description is that 2Africa is a 16 fibre pair cable with 180 Tbps throughput. It comes right off the 2Africa website. That public figure is a bit misleading. Only the Mediterranean and Red Sea segments have 16 pairs. The all-important West Coast segment has 8. Now these fibre pairs should individually be capable of 20 Tbps or slightly more. So West Coast transmission capacity probably does total 180 Tbps. Indeed, the Mediterranean segment could easily exceed 320 Tbps. And the same for the yet unfinished Red Sea segment. Design Capacity By Segment A. Mediterranean Sea: 16. B. Red Sea: 16. Not finished due to hostilities. C. Red/East Africa: 7. D. Red Sea/India: 9. E. West Coast: 8.

Tiktok is investing $25 billion in a Thai data center. They recently purchased over 4 terabits of Layer 1 capacity into Bangkok causing prices to skyrocket. I have located some spare capacity at the 10G and 100G level.   Appetizer ...  A point: Songkhla Cable Landing Station. Z point: SG1, Singapore.  Two diversely routed 10G waves.  Term: 3 years.  MRC per wave: $8.5K.

A point: SG1. Z point: FR5. Term: 3 Years. Routing: Avoids Marseille and clocks 139 ms RTD. 

The map shows the ultimate challenge for any cable crossing the North Pole. The Bering Strait is the exit for any polar project trying to reach Asia. But the average depth is only 30 to 50 meters. As you learned in school, the Bering Strait was a land bridge during the last Ice Age lasting from 37,500 to 12,000 years ago. The lower the temperature, the more water vapor is deposited as snow and ice on land. Hence the oceans recede as temperatures fall.  The construction rule of thumb is to bury a submarine cable when the sea is a thousand meters or less deep. This means a polar cable must be buried for over two thousand kilometers as the map shows. The North Alaskan coastal Quintillion cable's burial depth varies between two and four meters with a maximum of 12 meters. Deep burial is intended to protect the cable from icebergs scraping the sea floor in shallow water. A dual cable design raises per meter cost because the protect path would traverse the more shallow Russian side of t...

The illustration on top shows the Arctic cable's main predator: icebergs. In waters 500 meters or less deep, floating icebergs carve grooves in the seabed floor. These scars are typically one to two meters deep with the record being 15 meters. A fair number of grooves are carved 5 to 8.5 meters into the floor. Known as ice scouring, icebergs have left marks in water as deep as a thousand meters. These comments apply to both the North Pole and the Antarctic. Cables connecting either region to the rest of the world face this challenge. According to a US Government Geological survey, Canada's Beaufort Sea, highlighted in blue, has at least 2,200 ice scouring marks on its sea floor. Quintillion's cable extends into this region. Any cable linking Europe to Asia via the Arctic must go through the Bering Sea. Geological surveys have shown that ice scouring happens every year in the Bering Sea as wind and currents drive ice floes across waters as shallow as 20 meters. Although the ...

Quintillion was really formed to build a subsea cable from Japan to Europe via the North Pole. It acquired the assets, mostly human capital and preliminary research, of Arctic Fiber in 2016, and as a first step deployed a North Alaskan subsea cable serving coastal communities plus some terrestrial fibre. See the map below on the left.  No expense was spared protecting it from the harsh environment. Quintillion was buried 3.5 to 4.5 meters deep, probably a record, and for landings a bore pipe was deployed. Nonetheless, it was an ultra-high risk project. Icebergs gouge the sea floor as they float. It is called ice scouring. They carve trenches as deep as 15 meters into the sea floor. The fact is that there is no viable protection against them. Moreover, there were no icebreaker cable ships to fix the cable in case of outages. This meant that outages during autumn, winter or spring could not be fixed until late summer. As an example, Quintillion's most recent outage began in January 2...

Marseille/Mumbai routes have limited capacity. No guarantee of timely repair. IAX is a new, state-of-the art system. IAX has the only high capacity Mumbai/Singapore route. A point is any major Mumbai carrier hotel. No separate backhaul charges. MRC is comprehensive. Z point is SG5. Terms up to five years. Three year 100G MRC: $35K. Volume discounts available. Customer is responsible for cross connects.

Bevan Slattery likes to build things. His latest project, scheduled for a 2028 RFS, is the16 fibre pair APX-EAST cable linking Australia to the US. Bevan is Subco's CEO, one of the few successful private cable sea builders and operators. Previous projects include the OMAN to Australia system. The US Pentagon was the anchor tenant on that cable. Subco is a consortium member of the relatively low capacity, but important Indigo West cable linking Singapore to Perth and Sydney.  APX-EAST is designed to be fully powered by either end point. This is a resilience feature that should appeal to hyperscalers looking to take capacity on the system. I believe Google's Firmina also can be fully powered from either end point as well. Might not be a coincidence.  But the most striking feature is the lack of optical regeneration. Let's be clear. This cable is repeatered. It will use optical amplifiers like all other repeatered systems. Optical regeneration in this context means landing the...

In a conversation I had today with the editor of Capacity Media, I suggested the top challenge for the global subsea cable industry over the next five years is how to thread intercontinental traffic through the Middle East to Europe, India, and Asia. Trump's attack on Iran has shut down the Persian Gulf, which many subsea cable consortiums viewed as their best hope for a Red Sea bypass route. If wet segment outages happened, there would be no way to repair them today, just like the Red Sea off Yemen. Thank you, Donald.  In fact, SWM6 goes up the Persian Gulf and lands at Bahrain. It is linked to fibre along a highway from Bahrain to the cable landing station in Saudi's Arabia's resort city of Jeddah. So the SMW6 bypass uses the Persian Gulf up to Bahrain, traverses the Desert, and then rides the Red Sea to an Egyptian CLS. In addition, persistent rumors suggest that Blue-Raman will traverse Kuwait as part of a terrestrial route to reach the Red Sea. I don...

The FCC's authority to regulate subsea cables is grounded in the 1921 Cable Landing License Act. The legislation's language is vague. Hence it is open to interpretation. In late 2025 the FCC issued a very long and tedious-to-read 214 page ruling that clarified its stance on a number of important issues. The document is attached to this post. 1. The FCC via the 1921 legislation is responsible for issuing licenses for cable landings on any American territory whether a State, territory (like Puerto Rico) or island. It regards any subsea cable that lands on US territory and traverses non-territorial waters as requiring an operating license. Any cable that remains within US territorial waters is exempt. See https://www.fcc.gov/cable-landing-license-act . Many carriers disagree with the current FCC interpretation. They argue that any cable connecting two points of United States territory is exempt. Not surprisingly, the FCC has rejected this view. It has pointed out t...

Google announced today a $15 billion dollar infrastructure investment in India that includes a new cable landing station in Visakhapatnam (Vizag), a Mumbai to Perth subsea link, a cable connecting Vizag to Singapore via a Malaysian landing (like Bay of Bengal Gateway), a subsea network between Chennai and Vizag, and a major cable from Vizag to Capetown. Although hyperscalers are frequent targets of criticism, one cannot say they lack ambition. 😀 Google's connectivity investments aim to create seamless, high capacity cables connecting India to the US using new and physically diverse routes. 1. First cable from India's West Coast to Australia. 2. First Indian  cable to South Africa. 3. Creation of a third Indian subsea hub in Vizag to improve cable landing diversity. 4. A cable link between India's two East Coast subsea and telecom hubs. 5. India's second cable to reach Singapore via Malaysian overland routes. Remarks: 1. I think Sify is like to be the cable landing oper...

 African subsea cable leased capacity prices have bottomed around $18K to $22K MRC per 100G per month for Equiano and 2Africa. Examples include Lisbon to Lagos and Ghana to Lagos. Prices are not going lower. First of all, Google kept some Equiano capacity for itself and Facebook kept 4 of 2Africa's 16 pairs for itself. Moreover, 2Africa lands in over 25 countries. So average capacity per country excluding Facebook is approximately 6 Tbps. That figure would fall further if the Red Sea segment is ever completed. Finally, all consortium members for both cables are keeping some capacity for their own Internet backbones. Corroborating evidence that prices will remain stable is that consortium carriers are reluctant to sell wavelength or spectrum IRUs. Carriers sell IRUs for two reasons. The first is network asset portfolio rebalancing. If a carrier has plentiful capacity on cable X with relatively low pricing, it might sell an IRU to obtain capacity on cable Y that it can ...

A point: Most Mumbai carrier neutral data centres. Z point: SG5, Singapore. Term: 3 Years. MRC: $38K. NRC: $20K. Customer responsible for cross connects.

A couple years ago BTG Pactual Infrastructure Fund II purchased the subsea operator, GlobeNet, as well as a South American fibre optics backbone company, OI, and combined those assets with a couple of data centers. Globenet's main asset, its cable linking New Jersey to Sao Paulo, is near end of life. But its cable landing stations face no such expiration date. Moreover, the Fortaleza CLS is a well known peering point with a lot of customers. BTG put all the telecom assets in a telecom infrastructure subsidiary known as V.TAL. At PTC in Hawaii V.TAL announced its plan for a 16 fibre pair, 320 Tbps subsea cable that will link the Sao Paulo Equinix data centers to Secaucus Equinix and probably also the NASDAQ and NYSE data centers in Carteret and Mahwah, New Jersey. The Globenet assets will accelerate the project because Synapse will use its cable landing stations in Tuckerton and Fortaleza as well as some of the existing US back haul fibre. The OI backbone, purchased f...

Estonia is a small Baltic nation with 1.4 million inhabitants. It has eight subsea fibre optic cables plus several power interconnectors. It is a large number given its land mass and population. Over the last several years Baltic Sea outages have been frequent with many in the Nordics pointing their finger at Russia. Many of these outages have involved cables landing in Estonia. However, the Baltic Sea is extremely shallow. Its average depth is 52 to 55 meters. So cables in these waters are extremely vulnerable to fishing vessels and cargo ships dragging anchors. If they are not buried deeply in protected sea lanes, damage is inevitable. The other factor is the Russia shadow fleet. Europe is weaning itself off Russian gas imports with the figure falling from 8 billion cubic meters per month in early 2022 to 2 billion cubic meters today. When the war began, sanctions forced European headquartered global shipping lines to either stop serving Russia or place restrictions on acc...

TAT-1 was the first Trans-Atlantic cable intended to carry voice traffic. Up to that point the only telephony across the ocean was short wave radio. These first generation vacuum tubes regenerated the electrical signals used for communication. These vacuum tubes could only regenerate in one direction. Hence TAT-1 was a two cable system. The vacuum tubes were amazingly reliable with none of the 51 repeaters on each of the two cables comprising TAT-1 failing during its long operational life span. The cable introduced two other innovations, namely polyethylene to protect the cable and a coaxial cable design. Polyethylene replaced gutta-perch, a tree rubber product.