Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Layer 1 bandwidth is increasingly tight in the Pacific Triangle consisting of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In particular, many carriers' spare ADC capacity is completely gone. Whole fibre pairs are exhausted. Most older cables like SJC are maxed out. Even SJC2 is mostly gone. A large number of resellers is compounding the bandwidth misery by demanding 100G pricing in the $9K to $12K range. This is absurd and not happening. I know of 3x ADC 100G waves available on the Tokyo/Singapore route. One year contracts only. Non-Chinese carrier and equipment. Demarcation points are SG1 and Maruyama CLS. MRC is an inexpensive $13.7K. Don't be a fool and shop this price because this is the network operator's offer, not a resale by me. I don't resale. I take you to the Source (like the Machine Main Frame in the Matrix film series). There is one SJC2 100G wave available for contract early February. SG3/CC1. Available on a 3 year contract at $13.5K MRC plus a $10K install. One SJC...

I am starting to create subsea cable databases available to clients that include a variety of details ranging from RTDs, fibre pairs on each branch, outage histories, etc. Will probably incorporate a new company in Latvia for all the telecommunications procurement and consulting activities. Be bringing on part time employees. Also creating a new website to create some independence from social media: https://subseacables.blog/blog/. 

Insurance on AI data center provider Coreweave's debt is pricing a 50% chance of bond default during the next 24 months. Current yield on the company's long debt is 15%. AI is a real estate bubble and Coreweave is likely to be the first to crash and burn. Most top notch computer scientists like Turing Prize winner Jann LeCun view the current generation of AI, large language models, as a hyped technology that is fundamentally flawed. LLMs are statistical models whereas human intelligence can generate universal statements, not just probabilities. Statistical models like LLMs simply extrapolate trends and are not capable of true imagination. In the language of mathematics, anything truly original is orthogonal to the estimated statistical model. This is the true origin of AI slop. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-14/coreweave-s-brazen-dream-crashes-into-reality-as-yields-top-15?srnd=homepage-asia. 

Good outage and repair history. Diverse to any subsea cable routes. Enjoys comparable latency to subsea routes. Good standalone solution because repairs have averaged under 15 hours. 

Larger wavelengths reduce overhead loss and result in net usable bandwidth gains. Each 100G wavelength has approximately the same overhead loss as a 800G wavelength so bigger wavelengths reduce the ratio of overhead to data payload. Hence a fibre pair can gnerates more total payload transmission. Moreover, META avoids muxing and demuxing since many of their applications are 400G and 800G. Ciena, of course, wants to sell more expensive and profitable higher performance coherent and DWDM tech. I don't see this announcement as a remarkable breakthrough. It just reaffirms that the initial design capacity of 270 Tbps is achievable. For full details, https://www.ciena.com/insights/blog/2026/ciena-and-meta-achieve-world-record-800-gbs-across-16,608-km-on-transpacific-submarine-cable. 

Firmus wanted to go public valued at $30 billion. How much actual data center capacity does it have booking revenue? 46 Megawatts. About the same power consumption as Vienna's Interxion 2 data center. Now Firmus has contracts for 912 megawatts. But there is no guarantee given supply side chain obstacles that it can meet its obligations. Nor do we know if these 'signed contracts' have any contractual teeth. A good guess is less teeth than grandma. Despite only modest-sized AI data center, Firmus has managed to incur $30 billion in debt and plan to issue more.  For full details, https://thetechcapital.com/firmus-shelves-ipo-valuation-concerns

What is amazing is how the EU consistently rewards European companies that failed to anticipate technological change like Eutelsat and Arianespace. Its French executives were too busy with two hour lunches, Bordeaux wines, and crème brûlée to realize that LEO satellites were the future. See the quotes below. 😉 Eutelsat is one of the prime beneficiaries of the IRIS2 project which involves a 330 LEO and 18 MEO constellation that will only cost $18 billion. We all know that Starlink could have done the project for under a billion dollars. A Starlink V3 satellite costs $1.2 million to manufacture and provides 1 terabit download throughput. The point is that the European satellite industry is grossly inefficient. It lacks the economies of scale in production. Hence a Fortress Europe approach to technology is likely to be super expensive. EU procurement often rewards mediocrity because it is trying to create sovereign infrastructure in areas where the Americans dominate and won fair and...