Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

First Point: The Portugal and Spanish grids are tightly integrated with limited power connector to the rest of Europe. Solar and wind play a big role and both power sources suffer from what is known as frequency instability. Solar and wind generated power is much more volatile than traditional power sources. Traditional power generators have angular momentum inertia. It takes a while to up or lower the power due to the inertia in the spinning components. A natural gas turbine takes a few minutes to spin up. A nuclear reactor an hour to lower or increase output by 10% (French reactors do load following). Solar and wind create very volatile power fluctuations that can easily trigger a circuit breaker. In an isolated grid if a circuit breaker is triggered, the power in the remaining active part of the grid increases. This triggers more circuit breakers and usually brings down the entire grid. 2. The consequence of the first point is that avoiding a repeat of the Iberian Penisula outage re...

Top 10 ASN Ranking! Not Cogent. Not Hurricane.

`This article reflects discussions I have had with war planners, government officials, policy analysts, and subsea cable colleagues.  1. A striking fact is that there is no compelling evidence of subsea cable outages due to sabotage since the end of WWII. Subsea cables are poor terrorism targets. Terrorists create terror by killing and maiming people and damaging highly visible and important infrastructure like bridges, skyscrapers, prominent buildings or sites having symbolic importance. Intentional damage of a thin cable buried two meters deep in the English Channel does not have the shock value or cause sufficient disruption by itself to justify the great effort of clandestinely locating and severing it. Secondly, there are so many cables now that sabotage of one or two has little impact on voice or data traffic. RIPE analysis indicated that a country like Estonia experienced little layer 3 degradation despite losing subsea cables landing in the country or adjacent Finland, a r...

 4. The star-shaped organization model defines each department by function such as sales, provisioning, procurement, network operations and the like and has it directly report to the COO or CEO. Each department has a large degree of autonomy and independence which encourages kingdom building and departmental bickering.  We improve cooperation by recognizing that accountability requires some departments be subordinate to others. For example, procurement falls into two categories: backbone and the customer driven requests where a third party component like a long haul circuit, metro dark fibre pair or a local loop is required. Third party sourcing for customer driven requests should in the sales department. I know salesmen at one European carrier that source their own off-net requirements because procurement takes to 2 to 6 weeks to do it. Once a verbal yes is received, the salesman then points procurement to the third party offer. If sales determined the compensation and perfor...

Retelit is a competitive Italian carrier with a pan-European network. Retelit together with the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance have purchased Sparkle with a 30/70 ownership split. Why the current Italian government keeps insisting on public ownership of telecommunications infrastructure is beyond me. There are no real benefits. Italian government interference in important sectors like banking and now telecom have brought only problems, no solutions.  Government ownership often leads to management sacrificing long term financial health to goals such as preserving head count. This purchase together with the recent EXA acquisition of Aquacomm for only $45 million despite a couple hundred million dollars in network investments raises alarm bells about the financial health of the subsea cable industry. Sparkle generated a billion Euros in fiscal 2023 or 1.14 billion dollars at the current exchange rate. Yet it was purchased for far less than current revenues, a sig...

I've been in telecom since 1992. This qualifies me as an 'old fart' or 'dinosaur fossil' as American teenagers would say. This means I've seen every mistake made by subsea cable capacity owners. 1. Buying lots of capacity between cable landing stations, but owning no fibre from the CLS to the customers' destinations, namely the popular carrier neutral data centers. You can't be competitive if you must buy 100G or 400G metro waves from a UK landing station to Slough Equinix. Lease a dark fibre pair ring and light it with DWDM. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. Those network investments will dramatically improve operating margins. The amazing thing is that PPT members of cable consortiums make this mistake all the time. If it is worth spending $55 million for an undersea fibre pair, then it is worth adding a couple million to the pot for back haul IRUs. 2. Refusing to extend the network to new locations unless the order achieves an investment thre...

When you come to Europe, you go to Amsterdam. It's inevitable. Amsterdam is one of Europe's two main Internet hub, the other being Frankfurt. Also the city is a major logistics hub that is a good hunting ground for commercial telecom deals. 1. AM5 is one of the best data centers for Internet peering, but has no power for new clients or upgrades for existing ones. Novation is your best bet.  2. AM3, Nikhef, and AMS17 do have power.  3. Nikhef is the best deal for smaller players because there are no recurring cross connects fees, power is available, and fractional racks have no install charges. Peering opportunities are excellent with both AMS-IX & NL-IX present. Excellent site for both private ISPs and financial trading firms.  4. NorthC's two Amsterdam facilities have plentiful space to lease. Not a lot of connectivity providers yet, but could prove highly attractive to the server intensive crowd which needs a lot of racks and power.  5. Relined is highly reco...