Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Lagos metro data center connectivity is notorious for outages due to year-around construction with a 'I don't give a damn' attitude. Our new metro network rides new, truly diverse fibre pairs with no service affecting outages since deployment in early October. One path is aerial and the other buried. Aerial fibre can be more quickly repaired than buried fibre. All waves are route protected by default. Pricing is excellent. Services: Layer 1 10G, 100G, 400G, & 800G Waves. Terms: 1-20 Years. Payment Options: Leases & IRUs. Route Protection: Default For All Services. Cross Connects: Customer's Responsibility.

1. Ellalink connects Europe to Brazil. It offers a unique fibre optic path between Brazil and Europe. It is also much shorter than combining an Atlantic cable with a South American cable or an African cable with SACS or SAIL. Ellalink sharply lowers latency for traffic whose end points are South America and Europe. It adds resiliency as well to the regional telecom ecosystem. Wave costs are over $10K for a 10G and from the upper 20s to low 30s for a 100G.  Nonetheless, it struggled to get private funding because there is simply not a lot of traffic between Portuguese speaking Brazil and Europe. Most South American ISPs can more cheaply and conveniently do their peering and pick up content in Miami. A 100G wave from the Sao Paolo Equinix complex to the Miami NAP is now under $10K. That is a third less than going to Europe via Ellalink to pick up the same content or peer with the same counterparts. In fact, Ellalink should be cheaper than moving traffic from South America to Europe v...

This project excites many powerful groups in Europe. Scientists want to equip the cable with sensors to study the Arctic Ocean while the EU wants to strengthen its influence on the Far North and also create a unique, low latency communication link with Asia that bypasses North America. It is in large part about infrastructure sovereignty. The benefits are quite clear. Indeed, they are at first glance compelling. Right now the EU has given a few million Euros to a consortium of carriers and educational networks to design it and perhaps conduct the geophysical survey. Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated. Indeed, the project has two Achilles Heels. A single cable is likely to be down a good deal of the time. That is the track record of Arctic cables: outages take in many cases 4 to 9 months to fix. So it is necessary to build a ring, which means two diverse subsea cables. So the total project cost doubles. But that is just the beginning of the challenge. Most cable ships cannot...

The Michael Burry view is that companies are depreciating their GPUs over 5 year periods despite technological obsolescence in 18 months or less. This means negative profits and rates of return despite corporate claims to the contrary.  But heat stress also depreciates GPUs. AI Chips run marathon sessions during model estimation (training) often exceeding a month and GPUs often fail due to heat stress: "Imagine you had a 10,000 or even a 20,000 GPU data center. You should expect on the statistics a chip to fail about every 3 or 4 hours. So long before I get to the point where I’m rapidly turning these over because there’s a new generation of chips, I’m turning over a vast chunk of my chips just because they’re failing under thermal stress." Source: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-paul-kedrosky. GPUs used to estimate large language models are like ultra-marathon (50, 100, and 166 kilometers) runners on a 38 degree day.  It took Facebook 54 days to estimate the ...

 Dear Readers,  The International Telecom Union is hosting a meeting in Portugal in February to debate and discuss the resiliency of subsea cables. I think the debates will be lively. I encourage you to attend. I hope to be there myself. As I am not a member of any big international organization or company in the industry, it may be challenging to get attendance approval.  Regards,  Roderick. 

A point: Ashburn Equinix or 56 Marietta, Atlanta. Z point: Madrid Interxion 2. Term: 3 Years Bandwidth: 100G. Service: Layer 1. MRC: $5,990. NRC: $0.

The consortium has been coy regarding its plan to bypass the Red Sea. My initial guess was that SMW6's main trunk would land in Oman and head across the Saudi Arabian desert to Egypt. I know more now. The main trunk will land in Bahrain and Kuwait and then go overland to Jeddah. If you view the map, you can see there is a highway making an almost straight line from Bahrain via Riyadh to Jeddah. This approach makes sense because it uses an existing right of way and hence sharply reduces deployment costs. I don't know whether existing terrestrial SA fibre was used or new stuff blown through an empty conduit. Any Saudi terrestrial capacity will be very expensive although pricing may have been tempered by the desire to get the consortium to adopt the route as part of the main trunk. It will be interesting to see if Blue-Raman, Africa-1, 2Africa, and other stalled projects follow a similar path. Such an outcome would be upsetting for many Middle Eastern in the vicinity of the Red Se...