Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

TAT-8 was the first Atlantic optical cable. It was RFS in 1988 and signified a bandwidth revolution with its capacity 10x that of its coaxial predecessors. By modern day standards it was a pygmy with 280 megabits total throughput. But it heralded the beginning of a long period of rapid throughput growth. Optical repeaters were spaced every 50 kilometers or 30 US miles. Photo diodes received the weak incoming signals, converted them into a digital representation of zeros and ones, and then laser diodes generated fresh light signals. A copper conductor provided power. Lots of redundancy in terms of components were built into this amplifiers to avoid repairs. However, this approach had a severe drawback, namely the throughput could not be increased in a time where Moore's law was rapidly increasing transmission rates. The pace of the optical-electrical-optical conversion was set in stone because an upgrade would require replacing all the hardware on all the amplifiers. TAT-8's ca...

Prior to Equiano and 2Africa, the African continent was arguably one of the most difficult places to do telecom wholesale. But India is catching up. The African continent has two open cable systems whereas India has none. Although LightStorm 's mission is to create and operate carrier neutral cable landing stations in India, I am not aware of any major cables in planning that will use them. Unfortunately, Tata and Bharti Airtel still control most  cable landing stations. And they are typically the only carriers that can provide back haul from the CLS to the rest of the country. Hence they have de facto monopolies on the subsea cables that they land. As a result a 100G wave from Mumbai to Marseille generally costs about $65K per month on the older systems, which is well above African market pricing for routers of similtar distance. Capetown to Portugal is now lower 30s at the 100G levl.  However, there is one international subsea cable that offers hope for buyers. The Bay of Be...