Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Japan suffers from a lack of physical diversity in cable landings. For example, the Maruyama CLS serves 8 cables, most of them major Internet arteries including ASE, APG, Jupiter, TPE, and ADC. According to the Submarine Networks website the country has more than 20 facilities. However, they are densely concentrated as the map below shows. Moreover, it would not be surprising if many of the are sharing back haul fibre. Consequently, the Japanese government is giving money to Softbank for the construction of two new cable landing stations in the Hokkaido and Fukuoka projects because they make nations's telecommunications more robust The project's anchor tenant is the ETA (East to America) subsea cable.  In general I am skeptical of subsidies for a variety of very good reasons, namely they usually distort the allocation of resources in pursuit  of political gain. However, aid for new cable landings that are diverse to the existing landing infrastructure may be exception. It woul...

Network resiliency defined as up time entails higher build and operating costs. Resiliency in the subsea cable world reflects two basic principles: good construction practice and physical diversity. Good construction includes an undersea route that minimizes damage and time to repair. In practice this means avoiding areas where there are geophysical threats. These threats include ships, debris slides, earthquakes, and strong undersea currents that erode the protecting shielding of deep sea cables. Good practices include deep burial, undersea repeater redundancy (the number of  spare amplifiers in an undersea repeater), cable armor thickness, etc. Physical diversity means putting a big distance end-to-end between the subsea network and other submarine cables. The farther apart, the less likely a common event disrupts two or more cables. In most cases this means longer undersea paths that increase the construction bill as well as planning costs. Good examples include  the Aprico...