Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

This offer is for early stage ISPs that find 100G waves too expensive and worry about potential down time on an unprotected point-to-point optical service. This route protected 50G point-to-point Ethernet circuit rides Africa's most reliable cable, Equiano, which has had zero wet segment outages since it went live in February, 2023. The 2Africa cable provides the protect path. End points are OADC Lagos and LS1 Lisbon. Term is 2 years. MPLS restoration. Customer is responsible for cross connects. 

4% O&M; MRS1/SG1.  Fast Path: 135 ms RTD. 

Peace Cable Layer 1 100G floor pricing is approximately $17K per month on 1 year contracts for Chinese carriers. There is a $4K MRC premium for non-Chinese carrier capacity using Western network gear like Ciena or Nokia.  SMW5 MRCs range from upper 20Ks to mid-30K range. Mostly sold out; real offers extremely rare. AAE1 MRCs for the standard latency route range from $26K to lower $30Ks. 

You pay $40K for a 100G wave to the CLS, but its operator hits you with another $60K for the cross connect. 🙂 Much like the Hotel California in the Eagles' song. 😉

I will be presenting on African subsea cables at the Nigeria Peering and Interconnection Forum next week. I arrive Tuesday and depart Saturday. There are many ways to reach me: roderick.beck@networksourcing.net or WhatsApp using either 00-36-70-6055144 or 00-372-5855-6840.

The human mind is far more energy efficient than large language models. Even a genius like Einstein or Poincaré used 30 watts max to power their brain. 🙂 In contrast, estimation of META's Lama 2.0 front tier model required 700 MWh, and later versions much more. AI service providers are using brute force in terms of lots of resources such as power and GPUs as opposed to design improvements in their struggling attempt to achieve human intelligence and creativity. Throwing lots of power and GPUs at the challenge will probably not lead to the Singularity as larger models yield less and less incremental return. AI advocates calls it 'scaling', but I call it 'diminishing returns'. 😀 As a result of the brute force approach, AI service providers are losing money on their $20 a month subscription plans. VC money is currently paying not just for the service provider's infrastructure, but also subsidizes the end user pricing. For example, in New York video rendering comp...

Bulk Infrastructure, the Nordic data center and transport player, wants to build a subsea cable linking Norway to Canada for an estimated $620 million. While I applaud Canada for standing up to Bully Trump, this project is fundamentally flawed 1. Most Canadian Internet traffic peers in the US at Secaucus Equinix or in Chicago. It does not go to Europe and the same holds for voice traffic. Most Canadian international calls are to the US. None of this should surprise anybody. Nearly 50% of Canadians live within 100 kilometers of the US border and the two countries are each other's other largest trading partners. Bulk's project has no firm economic foundation. I worked at Hibernia Atlantic for six years from 2005 to 2011, the only high capacity cable directly linking Canada to Europe. Canadian transport demand to Europe was tiny. European transport demand to Canadian destinations was almost non-existent. Internet traffic between the US and Canada is many magnitudes bigger than be...