Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

With the exception of 2Africa, which has two landings one of which is 500 kilometers South of Lagos, all Nigerian landings are along a 25 kilometer wide beach in an area called Lekki. I expect 2Africa and Equiano to dominate the transport market going forward with 2Africa finally live in February or early March. At that point I expect combined capacity of these two modern cables to push prices into the teens for 100G waves. The older subsea cables like WACS, ACE, MainOne, SAT3, and GLO-1 will struggle to compete because their per bit costs are much higher. These older cables have far less capacity, but similar operating expenses similar to 2Africa or Equiano. For example, the older cables probably pay as much if not more for maintenance given their higher fault frequency. They are more likely to experience outages due to shallower burial and riskier routing through the blue ocean than either Equiano or 2Africa. Inferior service, higher costs. Not a recipe for success.  Unlike thei...

 1. The West African 2Africa cable segment extending from South Africa to Portugal should be live late February or early March. Excellent opportunity to diversify your network while reducing overall costs. Unfortunately, not clear when the Kenya/Marseille route via the Red Sea will be ready. Many buyers are currently riding Equiano single threaded or pairing it up with older, much more expensive and outage-prone cables like WACS, MainOne or Glo-1. Between Lisbon/Lagos, Lagos/SA, and Lisbon/SA, 2Africa 100Gs should vary from the upper teens to lower twenties per month on 3 year contracts. Like Equiano, 2Africa is buried deeper than the legacy subsea networks while avoiding the danger spots like the Congo Canyon or its Ivory Coast counterpart, Le Trou Sans Fin. For countries like Ivory Coast I expect carriers to initially hold the line at $35K MRC on 3 year deals, but I expect pricing discipline will disintegrate with pricing headed into the mid-twenties.  There is no reason to ...

CNN reports that two American government officials say the most likely explanation for the outages is simply irresponsible behavior in the form of a Chinese cargo ship dragging its anchor. This contrasts sharply with German and Finnish officials who have insisted on sabotage. My own take is that the Americans are right. Nothing about the sabotage hypothesis is convincing.  There is no recorded incident of state sabotage of subsea cables since WWII's end.  Fishing boats and cargo ships dragging their anchors are responsible for approximately 70% of outages with the balance due to events such as debris slides in subsea canyon, loss of power, subsea earthquakes causing mudslides, etc. Historical data provides no examples of state targeting of subsea fibre optic infrastructure.  Most subsea cables are buried 1 to 2 meters deep to prevent damage. So locating them is difficult even for cable repair ships. Repair of the subsea cable SWM5 was delayed several weeks because the shi...

"Two subsea cables located in the Baltic Sea have recently reported faults. BCS East-West cable reportedly experienced a fault at 08:00 on Sunday 17th November and the C-Lion cable reportedly experienced a fault at 02:00 on Monday 18th November (times UTC).  There has been speculation and opinion shared on social media and from news outlets as to the causes of these two subsea cable faults. Many commentators have pointed towards deliberate action. However, at this stage there is no evidence to make any conclusive statement. Particularly since the Nord Stream Pipeline was damaged in 2022, the security of critical undersea infrastructure has been a central topic of discussion, and action, for both industry and government. For these and future incidents it is prudent to consider the following: -       The primary causes of cable damage in Northern European waters are commercial fishing or ship anchors, with a smaller proportion of faults...

Southern Cross subsea cable system is implementing ODUflex, which is a relatively new ITU standard that allows granular Layer 1 bandwidth. No longer are we limited to 100G, 400G, and 800G for either subsea or terrestrial networks. Interestingly enough, Hauwei proposed the new standard and was its primary champion. All wavelengths consist of optical containers and ODUflex allows optical containers to be stacked at 1.25 Gps intervals. So you can lease 1.25 Gbps wavelength up to 400G in 1.25 Gbps increments. Note that port sizes are still 10G, 100G, 400G or 800G. So to access a 150G transmission rate the customer needs 400G intefaces. Ciena is one of the the vendors to implement ODUflex along with Hauwei. More details here: https://lnkd.in/dZvNbubc. It is worth noting that granular bandwidth is being implemented on the newer cables which Southern Cross owns like Next.  The commercial motivation is poor take up of 400G wavelengths. The only real customers for 400Gs are very big bandwi...

C-Lion Cable Down In Baltic Sea C-Lion is an 8 fibre pair high capacity linear cable that went live in 2016. Transmission rate is 144 Tbps. The cable connects Helsinki data centers to Frankfurt via a cable traversing the Baltic Sea. C-Lion lands at Rostock, Germany, and at Helsinki. The Finnish government financed, owns, and operates the subsea network in the national interest. One goal of the project was to reduce network dependence on third country transit via Sweden or the Baltics. Another was to provide enough capacity to grow the Finnish data center market.  Finland offers many advantages for large data centers. Its cool climate dramatically lowers cooling costs as well as extending server life spans. There is also attractively priced, reliable, and abundant power in the form of hydro, nuclear, and wind. I think the large Google data center in Hamina, Finland opened the government's eyes to the economic potential that subsea capacity unlocks. Indeed, Google announced just a fe...

Google's Firmina cable is a 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable that connects its Myrtle Beach CLS in South Carolina to Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina. Firmina was one of Brazil's first notable writers and novelists. The cable is on the verge of RFS with the wet segments done and the focus on securing back haul, equipment installation, and testing. Design capacity is 240 Tbps. The cable is open. This means each fibre pair or spectrum owner selects the Layer 1 technology vendor such as Ciena or Infinera. Hence Firmina is technology agnostic. This reflects the fact that subsea optical amplifiers are compatible with all DWDM manufacturers and hence there is no compelling reason for capacity owners to chose the same terminal equipment. The main reason for doing so was the consortium model where a single operating entity was created to manage the physical assets on behalf of the members. But this model lead to conservative, status quo decision making. Google and the ot...