Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Advice For Buyers Very little SWM5 and AAE1 capacity on the key Marseille/Singapore route. Moreover, the Peace Cable is still 4 months away, and SWM6 at least 6 months out. Blue-Raman's Marseille/Mumbai segment is scheduled to go live November, 2025.  Plenty of Equiano capacity   so now is the time to grab it over the next 6 months. I know several vendors holding 500Gs to multiple terabits ready to cut a deal.  European wavelengths have never been cheaper. It is now possible to build a basic 100G European backbone that includes 10x 100G waves for 10K Euros or less per month. So now is the time for African ISPs to expand their networks into Europe to peer and buy better transit. I have intimate knowledge of pricing, latency, resiliency, and physical diversity options across the major long haul European providers. My expertise will save a lot of time as well as avoid costly mistakes.  The badass 240 terabit per second Firmina cable is coming to South America and it will crash prices

 ***Well informed sources tell me that Blue-Raman is unlikely to go live before November 2025. My suspicion is that this is due to the terrestrial fibre builds across the Saudi Arabian desert as well as Jordan and Israel.  ***The 2Africa cable consortium controls its cable landing stations. So CLS operators are essentially employees. Not Masters of the Universe like in most previous African projects. 😀 In fact, the consortium financed many of the new 2Africa landing stations. And furthermore, not only are cross connect and back haul charges capped, but there are performance standards imposed on operators in terms of delivering power, space, cross connects, and anything else that affects circuit delivery or performance. Below is the 2Africa cable landing in Nigeria. 

Milano/Palermo;  2,000€.  Milano/Thessaloniki; 7,500€.  Coresite 1 Wilshire/San Jose Equinix; $1,750.  Hawaii DC/Coresite 1 Wilshire; $17,500. LS1 Lisbon/MDXI Equinix Lagos; $25,000.  CT2 Capetown South Africa/JB2 Johannesburg; Route Protected ; $8,500.  Valencia, Spain/Madrid Interxion 2; 1,250€.  Ashburn Equinix/Telehouse 2 Paris; Dunant Cable ; $6,250.  HK/Singapore; AAG  cable ; $13,500.  TY4 Tokyo/Coresite 1 Wilshire; Unity Cable ; $18,500.  

Academic studies generally suggest that ships cause anywhere from a plurality to a majority of subsea cable outages. The percentage varies over time due to natural variability. The number one villain among fishing boats are the bottom trawlers. Their nets scoop up fish and shellfish on the sea floor generally in shallow waters where sea life is more abundant due to higher oxygen and nutrient levels (plankton need light). It is in the range from 100 to 200 meters below sea level that trawlers cause the most damage.  Frequently the otter boards that support the nets dig deep into the sediment cutting or damaging subsea cables. See the diagram below.  The general consensus is that over the last 40 years fishing's relative contribution to subsea outages has been falling. This reflects depleted open sea  fisheries (fish farming has largely replaced them) as well as deeper cable burial and more emphasis on prevention. Another reason is the rise in global shipping as exports grow relative

The Dubious Narrative That Modern Subsea Cables Rarely Have Outages Earlier this year SMW5, which is a modern high capacity system RFS in 2016, experienced an outage in the Malacca Strait. It took the Indonesian ship almost a month to repair the cable because it could not find it. 😀 It happened because currents swept away the sediment in which cable was buried and it had drifted over 20 kilometers from the original burial path. Some commentators in the Linked 01 submarine cable group have claimed that many systems rarely have outages or in some cases no outages over their entire operating life. I have no doubt that new cables have fewer outages due to deeper burial. Also cable construction companies today more consistently avoid geologically dangerous areas. In the past West African cables were knowingly deposited in unsafe areas like Congo Canyon because it was cheaper than going around them or building cable landing stations near better landings. Four cables land at the Abdijan CLS

Africa-1 connects the telecom gateway to Europe, the Marseille Interxion campus, to the Middle East and East Africa. Over the last 15 years Marseille has become a telecom hub rivaling Paris, London, and Frankfurt because so many cables land there and place their landing stations in Interxion cages. The cable landing stations in MRS1 and MRS2 led to many carriers colocating in those buildings in order to cross connect to them. So Marseille went from being a telecom nobody in 2010 to a telecom hub today rivaling Europe's most important. The fact that virtually everyone is in Marseille Interxion means there is no need to extend the subsea cable to other cities. Furthermore, France has the largest Arab and Moslem population in Europe. So probably there is a lot of residential and business traffic between France and the Middle East. Algeria is a former French colony.  Africa-1 links Marseille, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti,Yemen, UAE, Paksistan, Somalia, and the IT hub of Easte