Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Google is a good example. The Umoja cable directly links South Africa to Australia. Humboldt links Chile to Australia. There is also a new planned cable directly linking the Indian East Coast to South Africa. No carrier consortium would ever entertain lighting such routes.  The answer is simple. As Google revenues become bigger and bigger, the opportunity cost per millisecond of any network disruption rises. More money is lost per unit of time and hence it makes sense to plough more resources into resiliency. As economists say, marginal benefit exceeds marginal cost. Google isn't building South Africa to India because there is a flood of traffic between the two countries. A key reason to do is greater routing options and hence a more stable network. The other part of the answer is Google's cloud aspirations. Its current global market share is 15% versus Microsoft at 20% and Amazon's 28%. In other words, it is playing catch up. Now Amazon has most of the Fortune...

Google's Bosun cable will connect Christmas Island, located in the East Indian Ocean, to Darwin, Australia, site of a large military base with rotating contingents of Japanese and American soldiers. The project was announced near the end of 2024. At the time it struck me as a bit strange. Google's new cables across the Pacific will do a lot of island hopping. This allows the power to be boosted, the islands can serve as traffic switching centers if they are hosting multiple cables, and complete OEO regeneration can be done. Voltage drops as electricity flows through the copper or aluminum current conductor. So the advantage of powering a cable at intermediate points is clear. It enables higher end-to-end transmission throughput. A key aspect of Google's Pacific projects is better resiliency. The easiest way to do that is a put a small prefabricated modular CLS on an island and land multiple cables there. There Layer 3 switching can divert traffic in case a ca...

Google has been a path breaker in the submarine cable world. It financed the first spatial division multiplexing cable across the Atlantic, namely the 12 fibre pair Dunant system . It is also the owner of the new 16 pair  Topaz system which directly links Canada to Asia and bypasses the US. Not to mention the billion dollars Google is spending to crisscross the Pacific with a web of new cables connecting Japan, Guam, Hawaii, Chile, Australia, Fiji, French Polynesia, and other island chains. Umoja is no less surprising than its predecessors. It has two key components. A new terrestrial fibre highway in partnership with Liquid Technologies that will head Northwest from Kenya's data centres to Uganda and then South to traverse and connect Rwanda, the Democratic Congo Republic, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and finally, South Africa.  The bane of sub-Saharan Africa has been the lack of domestic long haul fibre connecting the landlocked countries to each other and to the coasts where the su...