Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The 12 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable is a sign of our times. It links together Japan, Taiwan, Guam, Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia, but excludes Hong Kong and China on security grounds. Consistent with these geopolitical concerns, the cable's main trunk bypasses the South China Sea where China is demanding permit applications (which often exceed a year to get approved), can easily tap cables, and has created artificial military island bases. In a military conflict the fifteen cables traversing the the South China Sea would be at risk. Instead, Apricot takes a long route via Indonesian waters in order to head North along the Philippines' East Coast. The cable's design reflects the potential threat that an aggressive China in conflict with the Philippines and Taiwan poses to Southeast Asian telecommunications.  Although latency is much higher, Apricot offers attractive physical diversity because it avoids the cable congested South China Sea, includes a...

The 12 fibe pair Echo subsea cable aptly illustrates how American Digital Giants are increasingly dominating the Pacific subsea telecommunications market. Carrier consortiums have largely controlled the region's connectivity up to now with the last notable project being the Jupiter cable (RFS 2021) connecting Tokyo to Los Angeles. Google's first solo project was the 16 pair Topaz cable RFS 2024 that directly links Tokyo to Vancouver from where the rest of Canada can be served or the traffic sent South to Seattle. Going forward Google and Facebook own and control all the planned major new cables over the next several years connecting the Asia Rim to the US. Amazon and Microsoft are silient minority investors as well in many of them. Echo is the first cable to seamlessly connect the Singapore telecom hub to the West Coast. Hong Kong and Tokyo were the Pacific Rim's primary telecom hubs up to 2015. But Singapore has seized Hong Kong's telecom crown. This reflects several f...

The 2Africa cable is one of the most ambitious and important subsea projects ever undertaken. It spans a record 45,000 kilometers or 28,000 US miles. As the map shows, it extends from Mumbai to London with many European landings, completely encircles Africa, and provides dense Middle Eastern coverage. 2Africa has a record 46 landings which enables it to serve 33 countries across Europe, Middle East, and  Africa. It also serves India and Pakistan. The cable is unique in having many landings in several countries including 4 in Egypt, 4 in Saudi Arabia, and 4 in South Africa as well as 2 in Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Spain. A signature theme of the 2Africa project is improving network uptime through physical diversity in the form of multipe, widely separated new landings in key countries. For example, the subsea network brings much needed diversity to Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure with the first CLS outside Lagos several hundred kilometers to the Southeast. The othe...

Google's Firmina is South America's first spatial division multiplexing cable. It is Google's third South American cable after Curie and Monet. Spatial division multiplexing maximizes total cable throughput by adding more fibre pairs as opposed to maximizing per pair throughput. The result is 12 to 32 pairs per cable versus 2 to 8 for conventional systems. A SDM cable will run each pair at 12 to 20 Tbps versus a conventional cable at 25 Tbps or slightly higher. Firmina has 16 fibre pairs with initial 320 Tbps capacity. It is the highest capacity cable to serve South America and dwarfs the rest of the subsea networks.  Firmina illustrates the rising dominance of the American tech companies in the subsea cable world. These companies account for 50% to 80% of global traffic. They build their own cables as opposed to leasing capacity because it reduces cost per bit. Moreover, complete network control and transparency leads to better performance in terms of uptime and latency. T...

Meta's Anjana cable sets an Atlantic bandwidth record with 24 fibre pairs each transmitting 20 terabits per second for a total of nearly a half petabit. This huge capacity reflects its spatial division multiplexing (SDM) design. Traditional subsea cable designs maximize capacity per pair, but this leads to nonlinear signal distortions once a threshold is exceeded. Hence additional power to boost the rate above the threshold yields only small gains. This inefficient use of power limits fiber pair counts to 8 or less per cable with most cables rarely exceeding 150 Tbps. In contast, SDM increases the total bandwidth punch by operating each pair at lower transmission rates to avoid these nonlinear signal distortions. In turn, the lower transmission rates free up power to support enough more pairs to sharply raise total cable throughput, which ranges from 200 Tbps to a half petabit per second.  Another notable feature of Anjana is that it lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Santa...

The Tech Giant has announced it will spend $700 million building data centers in Poland to provide cloud and AI services. This investment is in addition to the existing three Microsoft data centers in the Warsaw cloud region. Price tag for those three data centers was a billion dollars. Poland and fellow former Iron Curtain countries comprise the EU's poorest region.  Microsoft's deal appears to be motivated in large part by strong regional demand for cybersecurity services given those pesky Russian hackers many of whom work under contract for Russia's Federal Security Agency.  Russian cyber attacks  against Eastern European states are common. In particular, the Baltic states have been hard hit. Putin has openly expressed the desire to create a greater Russia consisting of Russian speaking peoples and the Baltics have significant Russian minorities.  I am not an expert, but I am not aware of any existing Eastern European hyperscaler facilities outside of Microsoft's ...

Mombasa/Dar es Salaam; $15,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Mombasa/Djibouti; $15,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Mombasa/Amanzimtoti; $18,100; 1 Year; 2Africa. Capetown/Amanzimtoti; $10,900; 1 Year; 2Africa.