Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

I spoke very briefly with Tom McMahon at SubOptic 2025, whose design and civil engineering company has almost a 100% market share of Irish subsea fibre optic cable projects. Tom is spearheading an effort as an entrepreneur in conjunction with Orange to build the first Irish fibre optic subsea cable to bypass the UK and directly connect hyperscaler Ireland to the European Continent. Pisces has received two rounds of funding from the EU to financed research and design of the proposed cable. Frankly, I suspect the EU loves this project since it reduces the dependency of the Irish data centers on traversing the UK to reach EU member states. According to Tom, it's fully funded. Furthermore, the plan to sell all the fibres on the system and provide no lit services itself. My hunch is that it is partially funded, but is likely to get the money it needs and be built. I wish Tom and his team the best of luck. It's a cool project. Amazon just announced it is creating a separate European ...

I attended both SubOptic 2025 and a subsequent Carrier Community subsea cable event this week. This long shot dream came up in conversations. This 12 fibre pair project to connect Japan to Europe via the North Pole has formed a consortium together with a memorandum of understanding, but it has not secured financing or an anchor tenant. This is not surprising. Nordunet is the project's champion; it is a collaboration of the five national research and education networks of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, and Finland. The cable project is confusing because the vision is to have two cables, one using the shortest path possible, which is via the North Pole, and another cable for resiliency that snakes through the Northwest passage and closely follows the Canadian shore. Some sources estimate that the Northwest passage cable would cost $1.1 billion. Obviously maintenance fees would be enormous. Today there is no cable ship designed for the North Pole. The survey alone would require...

Capacity: 1x 100G A-End: Mombasa B-End: Marseille Term: 12 Months MRC: $ 58,500 NRC: $ 25,500 Capacity: 1x 100G A-End: Djibouti B-End Marseille Term: 12 Months MRC: $30,575 NRC: $25,500

 Far right is a 1920s era hybrid telegraph/telephone cable. Analogue copper transmission. Next to it is 1984 coaxial telephone cable.

Despite what we think, telecom wholesale service is not really a tech industry, at least not in leadership. Engineers, scientists, technicians, mathematicians, and computer scientists lead the real tech companies. Google is an excellent example. Sergey Brin and Steve Paige, two Stanford educated computer scientists, founded the company. German companies almost always select mechanical engineers to lead them. Obviously there will be cases of generalists who do quite well. Bjarni Thorvardarson was not a STEM graduate, but he has a critical, yet open mind and led Hibernia out of bankruptcy to a $610 million sale sale to GTT. He accepted a sales force initially composed of four sales contractors who had no salaries, but received 10% of net revenue, (gross revenue minus third party network costs), used a contract manager to handle standard NSA and MSA negotiations as opposed to a lawyer, and took the daring step of building the new, ultra-low latency Express cable in an era o...

EXA has deployed G.652d fibre across much of its European backbone with the important routes receiving priority. Chart below shows the paths that have been upgraded. EXA's western European network consists largely of the Interoute assets plus a Bulgarian company that had fibre and conduit into Turkey. It is a highly dense network that gives EXA's Atlantic cables and Trans-Atlantic capacity (it owns a fibre pair on Dunant as well as some capacity on Amitié and other cables) the ability to deliver traffic from Chicago and Equinix all the way to Instanbul. This dense footprint allows to deliver traffic at lower costs then its main competitor, Telxius. The carrier has the same basic reasons to upgrade as EUNetworks, namely fibre depletion, hyperscaler demand for long haul dark fibre, and the improved performance of modern fibre with less bending and linear attenuation. Its marketing emphasizes that it is deploying G.652d fibre, but I believe this is just marketing to reassure pot...

With most European long haul fibre having been deployed in the 1998-2002 periods, it is not surprising that after 20 years that carrier upgrades were in the cards. There are several reasons. One is fibre exhaustion. Secondly, although fibre itself does not rapidly depreciate because glass is highly stable, technology has evolved. For one, the optimal ILA spacing has sharply increased due to the advent of ultra-low loss fibre, which has attenuation of .2 dB or even less per kilometer. Since most repeater huts are old, replacing closely spaced old ILAs with new, more widely spaced facilities lowers power and equipment costs long term. With fewer ILAs, less can go wrong. There were other factors as well driving EUNetworks' upgrade decision. Although old fibre is generally in remarkably good shape, there are often problems at joints. At these locations, the fibre pairs must be removed from the cable for splicing. Moisture often penetrates these joint enclosures. It attacks and erodes t...