Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The recently announced Candle subsea cable is remarkably similar to the almost finished Apricot system. Both serve Southeast Asia. Although Candle does traverse the South China Sea unlike Apricot, it does remains outside of Chinese claimed waters. In each case the design reflects fear of China. But whereas Apricot is a 12 fibre system, Candle will have 24 fibre pairs with a design capacity of a half petabit per second. Candle will be the highest capacity system to ever serve Southeast Asia. This project is very challenging because it must hug the shallow Indonesian coast to avoid being subject to Chinese permitting authority and harassment. In such shallow waters deep burial is a must to avoid frequent outages due to shipping and fishing. Burial is expensive and time consuming.  Candle reflects the new reality. Avoiding Chinese landings is a top priority for security reasons because Chinese cable ownership means shared network control. Moreover, many projects like SJC2 were held up...

Anjana is a new Facebook Trans-Atlantic cable whose 24 fibre pairs collectively can push 480 Tbps. It is a badass cable. The equivalent of SpaceX' Super Heavy Launcher without the explosions. 🙂 The cable lands at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Santander, Spain. Interconnection points include Atlanta, Ashburn Equinix, Madrid, and Paris. A 100G from either Atlanta or Ashburn Equinix POP to Madrid, Marseille or Paris is $6,800 MRC on a three year contact with no install charges. Anjana's Key Strengths: 1. Physical diversity: It has the most Southern landing for a US Trans-Atlantic cable. Hundreds of miles South of the Dunant and Marea cable landing station at Virginia Beach. 2. High capacity mean attractive pricing. 3. META cable means high uptime. Note the cable path lies in relatively deep ocean water (symbolized by dark blue) for most of its journey. This sharply reduces the chance of boats damaging the cable. In contrast, the French coast and UK waters are shallow, defined...

1. Carriers begin small scale long haul hollow core fibre deployments in the next two years. Deployments balloon by 2030. The driving force is a one third reduction in round trip latency. This makes it attractive for Internet backbones and Tier 2 ISPs. Hollow core fibre can use a much broader range of infrared spectrum leading to a doubling of bandwidth.  Microsoft has already deployed its hollow core product (Lumensity subsidiary) not only in Azure data centers, but between them. Hybrid cables containing both Lumensity hollow core and standard single mode fibre have been deployed between European Azure data centers. Route miles deployed and carrying live traffic totals 1280 kilometers. See for full details: https://lnkd.in/dKhc4ANj.  2. The Saudis have an opportunity to dethrone Egypt as the Middle East gateway to Europe, but it requires they sharply drop pricing on their long haul routes.  The Israelis can also participate if they stop the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza s...

A point: DX1, Dubai. Z point: FR5, Frankfurt. Service: Layer 1 Wavelength. Bandwidth: 10G. MRC: $17.5K. NRC: $5K. RTD: Approximately 100 ms. Routing: Dubai, Riyadh, Jordan, Israel, Cyprus, Marseille, Frankfurt. Customer responsible for cross connects. 

Hollow core enjoys 33% lower latency than standard solid core single mode fibre. Moreover, it offers at least 50% more bandwidth because a much wider spectrum band can be used. In contrast, solid glass is hobbled by high attenuation outside the C and L bands. A final advantage is hollow core exhibits little chromatic dispersion. Single mode fibre is bedeviled by polar mode and chromatic dispersion. In each case, the speed of light through glass varies sufficiently by wavelength to blur the signal by the time it reaches the far end. The coherent optics revolution was largely about using digital signal processing to unscramble the signal or more precisely to use physics to work backwards and infer the original, pristine signal. But hollow core technology until now has been stymied by very high optical attenuation. This simply means the light fades rapidly as it passes through the hollow core. The light is absorbed rapidly by the surrounding glass border due to the absence of refraction. ...

Seacom announced today the Son of Seacom cable project. It's very ambitious with the goal of connecting Singapore to Marseille with a branch going down the East Africa Coast and up to Angola. I estimate the cable will land in 20 countries including Singapore, India, Pakistan, Oman, Dubai, Djibouti, Sudan, Egypt, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, and what appears to be Angola, but might be one of the two Congos. The press release claims it will a 48 fibre pair architecture. I am not sure what that means. A 48 fibre pair cable would make Seacom 2.0 one of the most expensive and technically challenging cables ever dropped in the water. In fact, no one has deployed a repeatered 48 subsea cable over long distances I believe the Trans-Atlantic Anjana cable holds the record at 24 fibe pairs and 480 Tbps design capacity. I strongly believe Seacom management will be forced to downsize their ambitions. A much more likely figure will 16 fibre pairs or 24 with ...

 AI Industry Implosion Is Just A Matter Of Time Too much $$$ chasing too few and highly imperfect applications. Yann LeCun is a towering figure in AI research and Facebook's Chief AI researcher. Won the most prestigious award in computer science, namely the 2018 Turning prize. Also researcher at the New York Courant Institute.