Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Marseille was formerly a telecom backwater. It was a minor POP location. But then several things happened. The UK lost its super telecom hub status because it had become almost a single point of failure. Virtually every Atlantic cable linking the two continents landed in Cornwall, England. Secondly, Brexit meant that the UK was no longer part of Europe proper, but rather a political anomaly on its periphery. Thirdly, the Digital Titans recognized that most Asian-Europe traffic Asia was bound for the European continent. Latency could be sharply reduced by going up the Red Sea, across Egypt, and then traverse the Mediterranean to Southern European landings. Finally, traffic originating in Asia and destined for Europe was growing rapidly. So the bureaucrats of the Port Authority of Marseille built segregated landing facilities and sea lanes. Permit application process was streamlined so only one office was involved. Secure facilities were set up for power feeds. By the end of 2026, 16 cab

This project is building a hybrid terrestrial-subsea network for Norway. The subsea portion is designed to link Norwegian cities on the West Coast. Building terrestrially between these cities is very expensive unless existing conduit is used. So the only cost effective approach to provide a route diverse to existing telecom rights of way is to go underwater. All Viking routes are 86 fibre pairs. The terrestrial routes connect not only the country's key telecom hotels, but also many of the major hyperscaler facilities as well as all of the cable landing stations. The Far North segment is for NATO and the Norwegian military. Norway shares a border with Mother Russia.  Viking's sales policy is to avoid the high overhead associated with lit services such as wavelengths. So only dark fibre will be leased or sold as IRUs. Dark fibre providers have very low operating costs. They can be run on a skelton crew. Fibre repair is always outsource to third parties. Simple devices can be inst

Several sources have whispered in my ear that META is planning a new 16 fibre pair cable that will encompass the world going from the US East Coast to the US West Coast via the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The most ambitious subsea project ever undertaken. I do not know the exact routing. I know that the cable will launch from the American East Coast and will go down the West African Coast to South Africa and then head straight to Mumbai. It is not clear if Europe will be online or not. From Mumbai it will head straight to Australia and then up to the US West Coast. I speculate that there may be branching units to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But the basic routing is US/South Africa/India/Australia/US. What is not clear is if there will be branching units to add more countries to the cable.  This semi-secret cable reflects META's desire for network resiliency given the four month Red Sea down time that AAE-1 and other subsea cables suffered during the first half

Eastern Light is building a hybrid subsea-terrestrial dark fibre ring connecting Sweden, Finland, the Baltics, Germany, Denmark, and Norway. This morning I interviewed their sales director to better understand this ambitious project. The fibre pair count is 3x 144 pairs or 432 in total. No lit optical circuits or wavelengths will be sold. Instead, customers will be leasing or purchasing via IRU fibre pairs that they will light using their own equipment. There are ILAs for the subsea spans located   on islands, but the short distances make them an option, not a necessity. However, some customers will undoubtedly prefer buying less and optically amplifying to juice the transmission rates. Because it is a dark fibre network, the customer base will be predominantly hyperscalers, big carriers including the incumbents (Telia's internationl network is old), university research consortiums, governments including their national militaries, NATO, and banks. In particular, hyperscalers are ex

Mist delayed due to hard rock at Indian CLS. Construction teams find the rock between the CLS and the beach manhole is too hard for directional drilling. A new path around the rock is required.  SMW6 will only go live in 2026.  APG down 12 months since start of 2023. Cursed cable.  2Africa struggling due to delays in the Northeastern Africa quadrant.  Bifrost behind schedule. Ground breaking on the Jakarta CLS was just in June and just a few days ago for the second CLS. Figure late 2025.  Peace cable is cheap in part because 40% of potential customers will not use it because Chinese companies built and equipped it. . Equiano 10G prices are relatively high because many carriers only offering 100G. There is a dearth of 10G providers.  Anjana and Firmina on schedule because neither cable is a consortium. Consortiums are too slow and make mediocre decisions.  Bay of Bengal Gateway capacity is low and prices rising.  2Africa 100G prices between Mombasa and South Africa are sky high in the $

 Like Anjana , Firmina is a content provider project. Google is the owner and bank for the 16 fibre pair (main trunk) spatial division multiplexing cable. The subsea network will connect the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina cable landing station to a Telxius CLS in Praia Grande (near Sao Paulo) and two other landings in Uruguay and Argentina. I think Google picked South Carolina because it represents a good latency compromise as some of the traffic is destined for Miami and some for Ashburn Equinix. It also improves the Google network's overall resiliency and its cloud infrastructure. I have noticed that Google has a tendency to run its fibre pairs at lower transmission speeds than Facebook. The design transmission rate for this system is 15 Tbps per pair whereas Facebook's Anjana is 20 terabits. So Firmina's design aggregate transmission rate day one is 240 Tbps. A quarter of a petabit.  Telxius has purchased a fibre pair on life-of-system IRU. I expect others will be looking

A lot of private equity money has been funneled into telecom infrastructure investments. My impression is that returns have been poor largely because the funds don't really understand the challenges in making wholesale operators successful. The key ingredient is not technology. That is available to all. Anyone who has the money can have Ciena's latest version of Wave Logic. It is the ability of management to run a nimble, lean operation that leads to success and very few high profile telecom managers understand that point. Sales cycles must be short and provisioning even shorter. Most managers chosen to run new projects come from staid, often incumbent telecommunication service providers that try to solve problems by throwing bodies at them. They are highly risk averse so they throw sand in the cogs by allowing lawyers to dictate the pace at which everything moves. I have seen customer NDAs with four pages devoted to data processing alone. And NDAs don't prevent customers f

1. Capacity Shortages Abound ... A. Marseille/Singapore route remains tight due to limited SWM5 and AAE1 spare capacity. Impact of Peace Cable is not clear..  B. The 2Africa cable appears delayed a few months and it is a blow to East African ISPs looking for relief from limited capacity and high prices. The 100G prices even on the active Kenya/SA 2Africa segment lie in the $50K to $80K MRC range due to Seacom and Eassy cable depletion. 2. The 100G prices for the NYC and Ashburn Equinix to Fortaleza and Sao Paulo routes range from $7K to $12K per month. 3. A new West African cable is desperately needed to rescue those left behind after the Equiano and 2Africa Raptures: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Bissau, Gambia, and others like Cameroon and Angola. I think there is a chance that Cameroon did not join the 2Africa consortium due to objections to the open cable landing stations. 4. Curie cable connecting LA to South America is really expensive. Overpriced. 5. I expect two new Trans-Atla

Landing late Monday in Lisbon. Departing Friday. Attending Atlantic Convergence at the Pátio da Galé in the City Centre.  Contact Details: Mobile 00-36-70-6055144. Work Email: roderick.beck@networksourcing.net. Also @roderickbeck on Telegram. And finally, via IM at https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderick-beck-94868948/.   Look forward to conversations and deal making.  Hot topics:  1. A half terabit of Equiano capacity available with LS1, OADC, and CT1 as the hand off data centres.  2. Inexpensive Lagos metro connectivity between OADC, MDXI, and Rack Centre.  3. Route Protected 100Gs CT1/JB2 at $8250 MRC. One year contract. 

The wholesale telecom community eagerly anticipates the lighting of the ADC system. This 8 fibre pair cable has an intitial design capacity of 180 Tbps. It will serve China, Japan, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. NEC is building the cable. Consortium members include China Unicom, China Telecom, Singtel, Softbank, Tata, and one of the two Vietnam operator incumbents.  My sources tell me the current RFS estimate is January, 2025.  Good Singapore/Tokyo pricing available. Figure as low as $15K per monthon long term contracts.  SJC and SJC2 are relatively good complements as they do not share cable landing stations with ADC.  HK-SG 35.5 ms RTD. SG-TOKYO 66.5 ms RTD.  TOKYO-HK 44.5 ms RTD.  Singapore Landing Station: Tuas. Tokyo Landing Station: Maruyama. 

Obviously the new Equiano and 2Africa cables will dramatically improve African network reliabilty. In fact, Equiano provided a huge amount of restoration capacity for Internet backbones that lost European connectivity during the four cable outage off Abidjan this past spring. As long as the network operator could get their traffic to Lagos or South Africa, they could get hop onto Equiano and reach Europe.  Long term there are two primary ways to create a more resilient pan-African network. The Continent needs large fibre optic interstate highways connecting countries. The challenge is that most landlocked African states have not truly liberalized their markets to allow internal competition, foreign ownership or even cross border fibre ownership. Landline monopoly is the rule in these countries. For example, today, the only way to link Burkino Faso fibre to its Ivory Coast counterpart is via a border cross connect. There is no cross border fibre ownership permitted. This is a serious dr

In the last 8 months there have been three separate incidents demonstrating the extreme fragility of the African telecommunications industry. The Red Sea outages included EIG, which has some Northeast African landings. There was a two cable outage near South Africa's coastal waters and then there was the very painful four cable outage right off Abdijan, Côte d'Ivoire, which severely disrupted voice and data traffic within Africa and also between Africa and Europe.  The common thread is a lack of professionalism. In the case of the West African outage, all four of the cables (SAT-3, WACS, MainOne, and ACE) were placed within the Le Trou Sans Fin (hole without a bottom) subsea canyon. This canyon is well known for debris slides. Yet it did not stop four consortiums from using it. The risk was ignored. Undoubtedly, the consortiums will blame the Ivory Coast PTT for placing the landing station right on Abidjan's beaches. But a subsea cable network is never just the wet segment.

SEA-H2X: A Mystery Player Among Subsea Cables This cable is very under the radar. Very few industry insiders ever mention it. Yet, it is not an insignificant project. The main 8 fibre pair trunk directly connects Singapore and Hong Kong. It uses branching units to extend the cable to Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, and a free trade Chinese port city known as Hainan. Hauwei Marine built it with advanced branching units that include optical switching as well as flexible power distribution. The cable's design capacity is 180 Tbps. At 20 Tbps a pair, I suspect there is upside throughput potential.  Interestingly enough, it is an open cable system so each consortium member selects and buys their own submarine line termination gear which I assume includes the DWDM kit. This helps to some extent alleviate the concern that Chinese security agencies have compromised the system. But there are other ways of eavesdropping other than infiltrating the terminal gear even though that is the best

1. The last 2Africa splice should happen in December and the cable is likely to be fully live April, 2025. Not surprising given this is the most complicated submarine cable project ever undertaken with over 40 landings and many new cable landing stations. Right now only the Kenya to South Africa segment is live.  2. Blue-Raman is farther out than many Blue-Raman providers are willing to admit. Not 2nd quarter next year. But year's end for the all-important Marseille/Mumbai segment. Don't be fooled. Salesmen are Liars. 😀 Except for me, of course. 😊 3. I can sell you 5x 100Gs on any of the three Equiano segments today and three months down the road will have 25x 100Gs available on the Equiano cable. Plus I have affordable local loops from Lagos OADC to the other two key Lagos data centers. Moreover, the metro fibre is amplified which is important for ensuring acceptable 400G and 800G wave performance. Most Lagos 

Advice For Buyers Very little SWM5 and AAE1 capacity on the key Marseille/Singapore route. Moreover, the Peace Cable is still 4 months away, and SWM6 at least 6 months out. Blue-Raman's Marseille/Mumbai segment is scheduled to go live November, 2025.  Plenty of Equiano capacity   so now is the time to grab it over the next 6 months. I know several vendors holding 500Gs to multiple terabits ready to cut a deal.  European wavelengths have never been cheaper. It is now possible to build a basic 100G European backbone that includes 10x 100G waves for 10K Euros or less per month. So now is the time for African ISPs to expand their networks into Europe to peer and buy better transit. I have intimate knowledge of pricing, latency, resiliency, and physical diversity options across the major long haul European providers. My expertise will save a lot of time as well as avoid costly mistakes.  The badass 240 terabit per second Firmina cable is coming to South America and it will crash prices

 ***Well informed sources tell me that Blue-Raman is unlikely to go live before November 2025. My suspicion is that this is due to the terrestrial fibre builds across the Saudi Arabian desert as well as Jordan and Israel.  ***The 2Africa cable consortium controls its cable landing stations. So CLS operators are essentially employees. Not Masters of the Universe like in most previous African projects. 😀 In fact, the consortium financed many of the new 2Africa landing stations. And furthermore, not only are cross connect and back haul charges capped, but there are performance standards imposed on operators in terms of delivering power, space, cross connects, and anything else that affects circuit delivery or performance. Below is the 2Africa cable landing in Nigeria. 

Academic studies generally suggest that ships cause anywhere from a plurality to a majority of subsea cable outages. The percentage varies over time due to natural variability. The number one villain among fishing boats are the bottom trawlers. Their nets scoop up fish and shellfish on the sea floor generally in shallow waters where sea life is more abundant due to higher oxygen and nutrient levels (plankton need light). It is in the range from 100 to 200 meters below sea level that trawlers cause the most damage.  Frequently the otter boards that support the nets dig deep into the sediment cutting or damaging subsea cables. See the diagram below.  The general consensus is that over the last 40 years fishing's relative contribution to subsea outages has been falling. This reflects depleted open sea  fisheries (fish farming has largely replaced them) as well as deeper cable burial and more emphasis on prevention. Another reason is the rise in global shipping as exports grow relative

Technology: Spatial Division Multiplexing. Fibre Pairs: 16.  Business Model: Consortium & Open Cable.  Fibre Pair Throughput: NA. Consortium Leaders: Google, Sparkle, Omantel.  Wholesale Capacity Players: Sify, Sparkle.  A point: Marseille Interxion.  Z point: Sify CLS, Mumbai.  Raman is the cable that could break open India's tightly controlled international capacity market. The cable is named after Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman who received the Nobel prize in 1930 for discovering that some of the light traversing a transparent medium is scattered and changes both wavelength and amplititude. This happens to be why the sea is blue. This 16 pair SDM cable will link Mumbai to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, and Jordan. Raman is striking in two respects. First, it is really an integrated part of the Blue-Raman cable that will function as an single network connecting Marseille to Mumbai and will be priced as a single, seamless capacity provider. It will bypass Egypt

Most subsea cables connect countries, but increasingly we are seeing cables that serve only a single country for a variety of reasons.Either the country is not contiguous like Indonesia or the Philippines or the country is exceptionally large with isolated densely populated cities like Australia. Or it is sparsely settled like Alaska's coast which has no significant land infrastructure like roads or gas pipes to serve as telecom rights of way.  Unitirreno belongs to the former category. This SDM (spatial division multiplexing) 24 fibre pair cable will link Italy's principal territories, the Boot, Sicily, and Sardinia. The design throughput per fibre pair is 20 terabits or 480 terabits per second for the cable. Unitirreno, if built, will be a very high capacity system. Nearly half a petabit.  Here is the company's key sales pitch and commercial justifications: 1. Unitirreno cuts the latency in half between Sicily and Genoa and provides a completely diverse path to the terre