Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Japan suffers from a lack of physical diversity in cable landings. For example, the Maruyama CLS serves 8 cables, most of them major Internet arteries including ASE, APG, Jupiter, TPE, and ADC. According to the Submarine Networks website the country has more than 20 facilities. However, they are densely concentrated as the map below shows. Moreover, it would not be surprising if many of the are sharing back haul fibre. Consequently, the Japanese government is giving money to Softbank for the construction of two new cable landing stations in the Hokkaido and Fukuoka projects because they make nations's telecommunications more robust The project's anchor tenant is the ETA (East to America) subsea cable.  In general I am skeptical of subsidies for a variety of very good reasons, namely they usually distort the allocation of resources in pursuit  of political gain. However, aid for new cable landings that are diverse to the existing landing infrastructure may be exception. It woul...

 A point: Lisbon Equinix (LS1). Z point: MDXI, Server House or Medaillion facilities. Term: 1 Year. Cross connects not included.

***Hong Kong/Tokyo, Tokyo/Taipei, and Hong Kong/Taipei. ***Outages started 10:14 GMT, July 6th, 2025. ***Until a cable ship can investigate, no idea of the cause. ***I caution the paranoids among you to refrain from speculation. Hong Kong is part of China so the sabotage theory is most likely bogus. *** The graph shows that the common factor among these segments is Taipei.

Google's SOL cable is the first Trans-Atlantic network to connect Florida to Europe with a landing at the Telxius Santander CLS on the Northern Spanish coast. The other cable, Nuvem, announced some time ago, will link the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina CLS owned and operated by DC BLOX to a landing near Lisbon. Details are sparse regarding SOL, but it will probably be similar in performance and design to the 16 fibre pair Nuvem cable that clocks 384 Tbps. The Florida landing is in the Palm Coast area between Jacksonville and Orlando. An interesting feature is that both cables do island hopping. Both cables land in Bermuda and Azores (where a US Air Force base is located). Island hopping serves three goals. The first is power to offset voltage drop. Intermediate power feeding en route improves throughput. The more often a cable can feed, the higher the bandwidth. The other factor is optical amplifier noise. Amplification introduces noise which accumulates from amplifier to amplifier. ...

According to FCC filings Starlink shut down almost 500 Starlink satellites during the first half of 2025. The company had them reenter the atmosphere where they burned up. What is striking is that these satellites were all less than 5 years old. The general consensus is that LEOs have a life expectancy ranging from 5 to 8 years. Shorter than expected life spans for the satellites will hit Starlink's income statement hard by increasing network depreciation and replacement needs. However, Starlink has managed to lower its LEO's manufacturing costs down to $500K versus initial figures around $1 million. So these production economies of scale might offset some of the higher than expected depreciation. However, there are also rocket launch costs as well. It costs Starlink about $3 million to put a satellite into orbit. The Falcon 9 costs $67 million per flight and delivers 23 LEOs into low Earth orbit. As a private company Starlink financials are a bit of mystery. The company press ...

1. The West coast network from Lisbon and London to South Africa should be all activated by year's end. 2. Note that 2Africa is an open cable system which means each fibre pair and spectrum owner is responsible for their SLTEs. So it quite possible that consortium member X is ready today whereas member Y might be RFS only in December. 3. RFS Guidelines A. London, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa will be RFS at the beginning of September. B. Côte d'Ivoire should be live a month later. C. Senegal is at least 2 to 3 months from launch and could be as late Christmas. 4. Buying Guidelines A. I expect the combined impact of 2Africa and Equiano to drive Lisbon/Lagos 100G market pricing below $20K. On this route I recommend 1 year contracts. B. In Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and DRC you should do long term contracts because there is no guarantee that 2Africa will permanently lower pricing. Short term the cable will do so. But it is least 2 to 5 years before another modern cable lan...

The new sport in Japan is breaking long haul fibre optic transmission records. NEC and the Japanese government agency, the National Institute of Communication Technology (NICT), announce new throughput records every 6 to 8 months. It is a major area of research. At the SubOptic 2025 conference NEC representatives did many presentations on their multicore research. NICT has taken a slightly different approach of combining multiple spectrum bands (C+L) with multicore fibre. This is more challenging because there are few C+L amplifier products on the market. In fact, only Subcom has manufactured and deployed such a system on the PLCN cable. Japan by the way has been a hub of innovation in optical networking and other high tech areas like space exploration. However, long term economic prospects are poor due to population decline and the low status of women which means their talents are underutilized.  What is special about this record breaking effort is the use of a 19 core fibre stran...