Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

***It is worth emphasizing that the DRC 2Africa CLS is a carrier neutral facility where all clients are treated equally with non-discriminatory and cost-based pricing and consortium-imposed performance standards. Moreover, there are several diverse fibre routes from the CLS to Kinshasa, which has several new carrier neutral data centers. The DRC market could be particularly interesting as it traditionally been a hell hole for telecom carriers. This means wholesale ISPs can sell at high transit prices. ***The other Congo (Brazzaville) is also on-net for 2Africa. And I can get you fibre transport across the river at wholesale prices to the DRC. 🙂 ***Special Note: ACR2, a Digital Realty data center in Accra, Ghana, is where most 2Africa capacity carriers keep their SLTEs.

TAT-8 was the first Atlantic optical cable. It was RFS in 1988 and signified a bandwidth revolution with its capacity 10x that of its coaxial predecessors. By modern day standards it was a pygmy with 280 megabits total throughput. But it heralded the beginning of a long period of rapid throughput growth. Optical repeaters were spaced every 50 kilometers or 30 US miles. Photo diodes received the weak incoming signals, converted them into a digital representation of zeros and ones, and then laser diodes generated fresh light signals. A copper conductor provided power. Lots of redundancy in terms of components were built into this amplifiers to avoid repairs. However, this approach had a severe drawback, namely the throughput could not be increased in a time where Moore's law was rapidly increasing transmission rates. The pace of the optical-electrical-optical conversion was set in stone because an upgrade would require replacing all the hardware on all the amplifiers. TAT-8's ca...

***Senegal is the one of the most challenging on-net 2Africa countries. 1. Sonatel appears to have a monopoly on Dakar metro fibre. This spells trouble. 2. Sonatel's landline infrastructure monopoly may be one reason many 2Africa consortium members declined capacity into Senegal, despite its strategic location as the natural Northwest Africa telecom hub. Another reason might be their lack of mobile operations in that country as Senegal is a small market. 3. ONIX data center is the place to be in Senegal. Carrier neutral and on-net for 2Africa. Most African ISPs coming to me for advice plan to make ONIX their home. 4. I expect 100G pricing to be high due to the dearth of capacity. Figure low 30s for 100Gs to Europe and upper 20s for 100Gs to West African countries. ***Ghana is much friendlier. Many 2Africa carriers are on-net at the CLS and also the very popular PAIX data center. In fact, I know one that has built a ring from the CLS to PAIX reflecting strong demand for the latter. ...

Facebook engineers during an interview on the Waterworth project provided details about their next big project. 1. Facebook is planning to build the first one petabit per second Atlantic cable. No details yet available on end points. Given traffic flows it is most likely to directly connect Continental Europe and the US. 2. META engineering is looking at three options to achieve one petabit per second throughput. A. Using both the C and L spectrum. This would effectively double the bandwidth. B. Cable will definitely be SDM (spatial division multiplexing). Strong likelihood that will be 48 pairs. C. Another possibility is two core optical fibre in order to double the bandwidth per pair. 3. I believe the most likely option is using C and L bandwidth. Arelion has incorporated L band spectrum into its DWDM Layer 1 service between Atlanta data centers and Ashburn Equinix using Infinera gear. Colt and Sparkle have used the L band on terrestrial routes. Most DWDM equipment today offers both ...

1. The Waterworth cable will link the US to South Africa with a branching unit to Brazil. It extends from South Africa to India & onto to the Pacific and the US. The total length is greater than the Earth's circumference at approximately 50,000 kilometers. 2. Subsea cable projects are taking 3 to 5 years from initial idea to commercial service. 3. US traffic goes to Europe. It's aggregated with European originated traffic and then traverses the Mediterranean Sea to reach Egypt and takes terrestrial routes (Telecom Egypt) to the Red Sea. Then the traffic flows down the Red Sea. From there it either heads to India or bypasses it with Southeast Asia being the destination. 4. In the eyes of Facebook's subsea engineering team, the standard cable routing described above creates a host of problems. First of all , the Red Sea is a single point of failure. Same holds for Egypt. Secondly, the Mediterranean Sea requires many government permits as cables inevitably goes through ter...

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.