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Amazon's New 420 Tbps Sta'O'Nuk Cable Linking Japan To The US

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Amazon's core network business is cloud services. These services generate less network traffic over long distances than Google's web search and advertising busiess. Customers download their data, compute, and then retrieve it or store it there. Amazon may back up its customer's data in another data center in the same cloud region, but traffic flows from cloud region to cloud region are probably low. As a result, Amazon has been a follower in subsea cables. Often a silent or minority investor like in the Bifrost where it is getting lit capacity in exchange for providing the US landing station. In some cases, Amazon is not a consortium member, but a fibre pair customer. Amazon bought a fibre pair IRU on the Marea, which connects Virginia Beach to Spain, from Telxius. It was probably their first physical capacity ownership on a subsea cable.  More recently, Amazon announced its first solar project, Fastnet, which connects Ireland, where it owns several large data centers, to M...

On A Layover In Doha

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 I am heading to Nairobi for ITW Africa. I will also use Nairobi as my base for visiting different African nations. Available to meet with anyone in Nigeria, South Africa, Dubai, India, and Singapore who has mutual interests in subsea cables, procurement, and network capacity sourcing. 

Equiano Special: Telehouse London/Rack Centre Lagos 100G Wave

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MRC: $19,200. Term: 2 Years. Lisbon/London backhaul route protected. 

Introductory Schematic of Subsea Cable Architecture

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1. The submarine line termination equipment, consisting of active electronics and transponders (lasers and optical receivers), was traditionally kept at the cable landing station. This began changing when carriers wanted to own and manage their own dedicated capacity (fibre pair or spectrum slice). Telekom Malaysia was an early example. It took two fibre pairs on the ASE cable as opposed to a fraction of the consortium lit capacity. Later the hyperscalers crystallized this evolution in the open cable model which limits common ownership to the wet segments. Each owner has either fibre pairs or spectrum and makes its own decisions concerning where to place the SLTEs. Because cable landing stations are not designed as large carrier neutral interconnection points, the SLTEs are almost always housed in a cage at a carrier netural data center. It is this flexibility in choice of location and equipment vendor that makes the open cable model so appealing. It also facilitates hyperscalers build...

Nairobi Here I Come: September 7th

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This is my first trip outside the Schengen Zone in 2.5 years. I intend to stay in Nairobi as my base of operations with trips to Singapore, India, Pakistan, Dubai, Oman, South Africa, and Nigeria this autumn. 

Useful Diagram of Coherent Optical Transmission Technology

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The FEC (forward error correction) encoder takes the bit stream and modifies it so the FEC decoder can detect and correct bit errors due to optical or electronic noise. To accomplish this, FEC adds extra redundant bits to the overhead that the decoder can use to identify and fix bit errors. The redundant bits are a mathematical function of the data payload values. This scheme enables transmission to keep bit errors very low without retransmission of the payload. It is similar in philosophy to the checksum field in IPV4. The difference is that the IPV4 field is strictly limited to detecting overhead errors and the routers respond to checksum failure by dropping the packet and forcing retransmission. In contrast, FEC is designed to detect and fix payload errors without retransmission.  The next interesting step is the bit to symbol conversion. Coherent optics represents bit patterns using combinations of optical properties like phase, amplitude, and polarization (there are two modes)...

Nigeria: 5,000 Fiber Cuts First Half of 2026

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And I have the solution to your Lagos metro network nightmare. Competitively priced and protected 100G waves using a unique right of way largely immune from civil and private construction harm.