Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

NTT and Mitsui Leasing have teamed up together with fibre optic cable manufacturer Sumitomo Corporation to fund a 16 fibre pair subsea cable costing $500 million. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the second project on which NTT Data and Mitsui Leasing have cooperated. The high capacity 20 fibre pair Juno cable was the first project. It is unusual to see a large incumbent player like NTT undertaking a subsea cable project with a non-telecom company as co-owner. But the advantages are clear. Mitsui will contribute cash, but not play a major role in design, vendor selection or wholesale commercials. So it not only reduces NTT's risk by sharing funding requirements, but it gives NTT a free hand in decision making. One lesson that has become perfectly clear is that large carrier consortiums increase the likelihood of deployment delays and lengthen the entire planning cycle because decisions require consensus. Moreover, the consensus requirement makes it difficult for new approaches...

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 ...

Heavy rains in Côte d'Ivoire likely caused rivers to dump large amounts of sediment at high speed into the Atlantic. These undersea mud Tsunamis accelerate down the deep gradient of the continental shelf off Abidjan and destroy anything in their path. In particular, they displace the sea floor up to several meters. It is likely that a turbidity current effectively disinterred the WACS trunk and severed it. The main value of WACS is moving traffic between Africa and Europe. So this outage imposes severe hardship on African ISPs. Outages off Côte d'Ivoire's shore are common and have disrupted Internet service in the country many times. For example, in 2024 a debris slide in the subterranean canyon off Abidjan took out four cables, including WACS. Côte d'Ivoire really needs high capacity fibre optic links into neighboring countries to better weather these network crises.

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...

Mombasa/Dar es Salaam; $15,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Mombasa/Djibouti; $15,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Mombasa/Amanzimtoti; $18,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Capetown/Amanzimtoti; $10,900; 1 Year; 2Africa.

Type of Cable System: Latest Generation Coherent Optics.  Open Cable System: Yes, and possibly the first for Southeast Asia.  Consortium Members: China Telecom, Singtel, Globe Telecom (Philippines), DITO (Philippines), Singtel, Malaysia Telecom, Global Transit, and UNN (Brunei).  Construction Status: On schedule.  Number of Fibre Pairs: 8.  Estimated RFS: 3Q2025. Day One Aggregate Throughput: 144 Tbps.  Salient Features: Three digit terabit cable between Singapore, China, HK, Malaysia, Vietname, and Philippines.  ALC connects Brunei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, and China. It is a 8 fibre pair system with minimum throughput per pair of 18 terabits per second. Hauwei Marine is building the system which should be ready for service 3Q2025. The project co-leads are Singtel and China Telecom. Hauwei's involvement will deter many foreign carriers from using the cable's transport services, but there are extensive commercial  ties and strong telecom...

The American carrier Zayo has an extensive European wide area network as well as a highly ranked international Internet backbone. Its relatively new subsea Zeus cable links Amsterdam to London via a double armored 96 fibre pair system buried on average between 2 and 3 meters deep. Although Zayo's press releases nowhere states it, any 96 fibre pair cable is undoubtedly unrepeatered just like Scylla and CrossChannel because a repeatered system would probably require more power than possible. Repeatered 96 pair cables do not exist. And like Scylla, Zeus uses ultra-low loss fibre. Probably the Corning SMF28 product. The cable's current throughput is 2.6 petabits per second with the potential to do up to 4 petabits.  One reason both Scylla and Zeus are buried so deep is that the North Sea sediment layers off the  Netherland's coasts are not stable. They move carried by the North Sea's strong wind and sea currents. This necessitates deeper burial to ensure the cable does no...

My best guess is that this extraordinary project goes fully live by the end of the first quarter of 2025. So far only the Kenya/Tanzania/South Africa segments have been activated and it is not clear whether they passing live traffic at this point. For more details, click on  https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/2africa-cable-set-live-between-south-africa-and-kenya/.  The 2Africa subsea network is based on the principle of carrier neutrality. So in principle cable landing station ownership or operating licenses should not matter in carrier vendor selection. But until practice proves neutrality is being honored, it is best to request capacity from a provider that operates one or both cable landing stations. This advice does not apply to routes that use carrier neutral data centres to house the CLS. So, for example, the Genoa/South Africa path uses GN1 Equinix to house the CLS in Italy and also Teraco data centres. Opportunistic CLS behavior is far less likely when a carrie...

I have teamed up with a nimble African carrier that can quickly deliver  100G waves on the Equiano   cable between carrier neutral data centres for $25K a month or less on 1 year contracts. Both Lisbon/Lagos and Lagos/South Africa routes. Best of all, the provider has a Lagos metro fibre network so it can extend your network on its own fibre from OADC where the Equiano CLS is housed to MDXI Equinix and other data important centres like Rack Centre. This offers significant cost savings over Bharti Airtel and China Mobile International.  We provide 100G wavelength rings between OADC, MDXI, and Rack Centre at prices far less than the customary market offers which vary from $7K to $11K per 100G span. Most Equiano cable capacity providers including t he Chinese and Indian carriers do not own fibre between the Lagos telecom hotels and hence their end-to-end capacity quote will rise by $5K to $10K once wavelength tails are included. Currently no dark fibre is available in Lago...

Seacom went live two days ago and EIG is now being repaired. The repairs revealed that an anchor damaged the cables and hence vindicate my theory that the Rubymar was responsible. Bloomberg quoted me on this issue shortly after the outages started The Houthis hit this ship with a missile and it dropped anchor so the crew could evacuate in life boats. It then drifted over 20 kilometers scrapping the sea floor with its huge anchor which probably weighs five to ten tons. Although Red Sea cables are usually buried, the sea floor is generally soft silt and a heavy anchor will simply sink through the silt and then plow it as the ship drifts. In general, most subsea outages around the world happen on the shallow continental shelf. That means shallow coastal waters where ships damage them via fishing or anchor dropping. Ships drop anchor to achieve a full stop, to stabilize it in transit during bad weather or steady it during an evacuation like the Rubymar.  The real question surrounding ...

2Africa Landings Luando, Angola Manama, Bahrain Moroni, Comoros Muanda, Democratic Republic of Congo Pointe-Noire, Congo Abidjan, Ivory Coast Djibouti City, Djibouti Port Said, Egypt Ras Ghareb, Egypt Suez, Egypt Zafarana, Egypt Marseille, France Libreville, Gabon Accra, Ghana Tympaki, Greece Mumbai, India Al Faw, Iraq Genoa, Italy Mombasa, Kenya Mtwapa, Kenya Kuwait City, Kuwait Mahajanga, Madagascar Maputo, Mozambique Nacala, Mozambique Kwa Ibo, Nigeria Lagos, Nigeria Barka, Oman Salalah, Oman Karachi, Pakistan Caravelos, Portugal Doha, Quatar Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia Duba, Saudi Arabia Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Yanbu, Saudi Arabia Dakar, Senegal Carana, Seychelles Berbera, Somalia Mogadishu, Somalia Amanzimtoti, South Africa Duynefontein, South Africa Ggeberha, South Africa Yzerfontein, South Africa Barcelona, Spain Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain Port Sudan, Sudan Dar Es Salam, Tanzania Abu Dhabi, UAE Kalba, UAE Bude, UK Sources:  https://www.2africacable.net/, https://wiocc...

The 2Africa cable is one of the most ambitious and important subsea projects ever undertaken. It spans a record 45,000 kilometers or 28,000 US miles. As the map shows, it extends from Mumbai to  London with European landings, completely encircles Africa, and provides dense Middle Eastern coverage. 2Africa has a record 46 landings which enables it to serve 33 countries across Europe, Middle East,  Africa, India, and Pakistoan. It is unique in having multiple landings in several countries including 4 in Egypt, 4 in Saudi Arabia, 4 in South Africa, and finally 2 in Congo as well as Kenya, Mozambique, and Spain. A signature theme of the 2Africa project is to improve network uptime through physical diversity in the form of multiple, widely separated new landings in key countries. For example, the subsea network brings much needed diversity to Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure with the first CLS outside Lagos several hundred kilometers to the Southeast.  The 2Africa c...