Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Zurich, Marseille, Madrid, Munich, Vienna, and many more are Layer 1 400G wave ready. Standard three year pricing is under 3000€ per month plus at least 1200 Euros a month in cross connect savings over buying 4x 100Gs. Many routes have been completely redone including conduit and ILAs with new ultra-low loss fibre and unique city approaches. 

ACE is a two fiber pair 20 Tbps cable that links Paris and Lisbon to 16 West African countries. For nine countries it is their only cable and there is not much cross border fibre. Ivory Coast reported an outage started October 19th. Service was restored today. Vandals cut the back haul fibre.  However, there appears to be a subsea problem as well. The Sophie Germain has left port and will fix a fault on the cable's segment 6. She will reach the probable repair site November 1st. It is probably a fault where water has reached the power conductor and increased electrical resistance, but not affected optical performance. Otherwise we would see more performance degradation reports. Note that power compensation in these cases is limited. Water will eventually disrupt power totally if not quickly repaired and cause a major outage.  hashtag hashtag

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

  It is not enough to have Equiano capacity into Lagos. You need to reach the offnet Equinix, Rack Centre, and Medallion data centres. Transmission Co's metro Lagos network delivers them all. We offer 10G, 100G, and 400G wavelengths on an optically amplified metro fibre ring connecting the must-have carrier neutral data centres. Contact me for more info and a proposal. We can provide inexpensive wavelengths between OADC, MDXI Equinix, and Rack Centre with the two Medallion sites on-net by 1Q2025. We offer the best performance and pricing. Our founder and CEO, Mark Tinka, is a well respected network engineer who was head of Seacom engineering for over a decade. Let's do a deal! Provisioning is two weeks max.

Marseille/Singapore; 10G; AAE1; $3200. Dallas Equinix/Ashburn Equinix; $2200. Singapore/Tokyo; ADC; 100G; $15K. Mumbai/Singapore; Via Chennai landing; 100G; $22K. Lisbon/Lagos; Equiano; 10G; $7500. Lisbon/South Africa; Equiano; 100G; $25K. Milano/Palermo; 100G; 2000€. Lisbon/Madrid; 100G; 1100€. Ashburn Equinix/Paris; Dunant; $5750. Milano/Thessaloniki; 100G; $7500. 

 A few days ago I wrote that Facebook was planning a new subsea cable directly linking the US East Coast to South Africa, then up to India, onward to Australia, and finally to the US West Coast. Clearly resiliency is a big theme. It avoids Lisbon, Marseille, Egypt, the Red Sea, and Singapore. All choke points due to their telecom hub status. Note that the map below shows lots of branching units, but I don't have insider confirmation although they make perfect sense. The cable is 16 fibre pairs.  This cable may be heavily influenced by AI considerations. AI data centres require lots of space and power. The US, South Africa, India, and Australia are good candidates for AI data centres in terms of space. All of them except for South Africa have modern power grids. But South Africa is still the best place on the continent for large scale AI facilities. An AI theme makes particular sense given the cable's high latency. An AI data centre does not directly serve custom

The advent of 2Africa and Equiano cables will make the older African cables like WACS, ACE, and MainOne stranded assets in those markets where they compete head-to-head against the former. Both 2Africa and Equiano are much higher capacity systems; this means a lower cost per bit. There are big economies of scale in network equipment. But the biggest difference is that high capacity does not entail higher subsea maintenance charges. The annual fees paid to the cable ships do not depend on lit capacity. It is quite possible that Equiano pays far less than WACS due to Google's bargaining power and the fact the cable is buried deeper and avoids the dangerous subterranean canyons where a disproportionate number of African subsea faults happen. The maintenance charge is effectively insurance which should reflect the degree of risk. So Equino's cost per bit as a function of the fixed annual repair fee could be much less than for ACE, MainOne, and WACS. Equiano's design transmissio