Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Zuckerberg should pull his head out of his ass. Yann LeCun's META departure underscores just how much Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted away from seeking AI innovation to chasing the latest fad, namely large language models like ChatGPT. Zuckerberg has a history of bad decisions. The stillborn Metaverse is just one example. Yann LeCun is one of the AI Godfathers. He used convolutional neural nets to greatly improve optical character recognition and computer vision. In contrast, large language models are an obvious dead end due to their creative writing tendencies and amoeba-like reasoning abilities (no offense, amoebas, you actaully excel ChatGPT). Fundamental breakthroughs are not achieved by scaling up digital parrots. Yann has repeatedly noted that the best AI models, the large language models, appear to be just regurgitation machines without any ability to reach new conclusions. They cannot identify or correct their own mistakes or realize that their approach is failing and adopt a n...

- 2Africa is much more expensive than Equiano. The 2Africa 100G pricing is $25K and above excluding tails for Lisbon to Lagos. In contrast, Equiano 100G pricing is below $20K now. Similarly, Equiano 10G pricing gravitates around $5K versus $10K on the same route for 2Africa.  The reason for this disparity is that the 144 Tbps Equiano cable primarily serves South Africa, Portugal, and Nigeria. In contrast, the 180 Tbps 2Africa network serves over 30 countries and Facebook kept 4 of the 16 pairs for itself. Note that the 2Africa map does not include the Pearls extension of 2Africa to the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, and Mumbai.  Another sign of the impending capacity crunch is the unwillingness of 2Africa consortium members to sell IRUs. An IRU is a long term capacity sale ranging typically dffrom 10 years to life of system. Carriers will not sell IRUs if they expect future capacity shortages or think they are likely. Many of these carriers have transit backbones that they must keep ...

Google's Bosun cable will connect Christmas Island, located in the East Indian Ocean, to Darwin, Australia, site of a large military base with rotating contingents of Japanese and American soldiers. The project was announced near the end of 2024. At the time it struck me as a bit strange. Google's new cables across the Pacific will do a lot of island hopping. This allows the power to be boosted, the islands can serve as traffic switching centers if they are hosting multiple cables, and complete OEO regeneration can be done. Voltage drops as electricity flows through the copper or aluminum current conductor. So the advantage of powering a cable at intermediate points is clear. It enables higher end-to-end transmission throughput. A key aspect of Google's Pacific projects is better resiliency. The easiest way to do that is a put a small prefabricated modular CLS on an island and land multiple cables there. There Layer 3 switching can divert traffic in case a ca...

A point: TY3. Z point: 2905 Diehl Road, Aurora Illinois. Service: 10G Wave (Layer 1). Subsea Cable: Topaz. MRC: $11,999. NRC: $1250. Term: 1 Year.

Most financial traders rely on the PC-1 or Topaz subsea cables to move market data and orders between the Japanese Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But all subsea cables eventually experience outages. Highly diverse, yet low latency protect path using new Juno network. Layer 10G pricing is great. A-end address: Tokyo Equinix TY3 Z-end address: CME Aurora data centre. Bandwidth: Linear 10G (unprotected). RTD: 122ms or lower. 12M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 8,000 24M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 7,800 36M Quote OTC: USD 5,000 MRC: USD 7,650

1. ASE; 100G Wave; Tokyo/Singapore; $19K MRC; 2 Years. 2. AAE1; 10G Wave; Marseille/Singapore; $3,500 MRC; 3 Years. 3. Juno; 100G Wave; Tokyo/LA; $16,461 MRC; 3 Years. 4. ADC; 100G Wave; HK/Singapore; $12.3K MRC; 3 Years. 5. Faster; 100G Wave; TY2/Coresite LA; $18.2k MRC; 3 Years.

 Capacity: 100G (PEACE) A-End: Mombasa B-End: Marseilles Term: 24 Month MRC: $40,500 NRC: $ 15,000