Blog is devoted to educating readers about the subsea cable industry with a particular focus on recent events and new submarine cable projects. Ideal for those in the industry who wants breaking news on outages, new projects, and general industry trends. Roderick Beck worked as a sales contractor for Hibernia Atlantic and helps buyers procure capacity and providers make sales.
A shunt fault is damage to the insulation around the power conductor that all subsea cables require for undersea optical amplification. It causes an electric short. They are most common in the deep sea where the cable lies exposed on the sea floor as opposed to near shore where burial is routine. Abrasion caused by deep sea currents that rub cables against sharp surfaces like rocks are the usual…
An Irish company, MDM, whose founding members have done a lot of design work for hyperscalers, has announced it is building two Trans-Atlantic cables in addition to its Pisces project that will connect Ireland to Europe. The estimated construction cost is $500 million. The network is a classic dual ring design where the Northern cable lands at Galway and on Long Island. Now there are several Long…
Light takes .489 milliseconds or roughly a half millisecond to go 100 kilometers. Get the route miles and you have a great approximation because optical amplifiers or end point electronics have little impact. So Dunant is 13,200 kilometers CLS/CLS. That is 132 times a half millisecond or 66 milliseconds RTD. For full details, click on…
Google announced today three new cables: Alisios, Canoa, and Olaluz. President Trump will not be happy with the names. Not American enough. Alisios is a Spanish word denoting the trade winds that cross the Carribean and the Equator. This cable will connect the Dominican Republic to Chile via Panamanian landings. So it will include new long haul fiber routes across Panama. Canoa links the Dominican…
Two year term.
"It's not out of the question that, at some point, Starlink will operate most of the world's internet," Musk said." Despite this optimism, shares of SpaceX fell by more than 7% in after hours trading on Tuesday, wiping out gains made during the day.
The 2Africa cable has been up and down since Wednesday. Repair was declared completed and all services live Friday Morning Abidjan time. WACS should be fixed by Wednesday next week.
Oracle's stock price is diving. Why? A lesson for the AI industry. An AI data center customer faces no switching costs as they are simply installing data and software in bare metal servers leased to them by the data center. The result is a buyer's market as opposed to the traditional sellers market in which Equinix and Digital Reality operate. Oracle, the software company, reinvented itself as a…
Nvidia guaranteeing OpenAI's 250 billion in data center commitments is a huge gamble given that OpenAI is forecasting it will burn through $665 billion in cash by 2030. Nvidia's entire future depends on OpenAI's success or failure. The lack of prudence and financial discipline is astonishing. Russian roulette, anyone? History is quite clear: never finance money losing customers. Any credit check…
Just a few months ago Linkedin Prophets were proclaiming SpaceX hegemony. It was in their words 'a space utility' that would dominate space infrastructure due to 'vertical integration', Musk Infallibility, and 'rocket launch cadence'. Now their only excuse is 'short selling' as though $18 billion in annual revenues naturally implies Space is worth two trillion dollars. This inference is built on…
The FCC is introducing a new regulatory framework for subsea cables. The previous approach involved a Federal interagency group known as Team Telecom reviewing each cable landing and the associated owners of the subsea network. Team Telecom includes representatives of the FCC, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and Homeland Security. Moreover, advisory agencies include Department of…
It turns out that the CS Sovereign, a Global Marine ship whose home port is Portland, UK, is sailing down the West African cost to Abidjan to fix WACS. Why was the Sovereign chosen when it is so far away? Every cable system has one or two storage depots where fibre is kept for repairs. WACS spare fiber and other repair supplies are kept at Brest, France. Now Orange Marine has a cable ship, the…
Fear is gripping the SpaceX Faithful as they watch their Dreams of Dominating the Galaxy evaporate in the harsh glare of market financial scrutiny. Short term the market is a voting machine. But long term, it's a calculating machine. August 5th is the quarterly earning release. It will show more massive losses just like 1Q2026. Moreover, the investors that financed SpaceX as a private company will…
The cable ship repair permit has been granted. It is expected to arrive off Abidjan on July 22nd. The 2Africa cable will be the first repaired despite its outage being limited to the Cote d'Ivoire branch. WACS repair is expected to begin at the month's end. The ASN Ile D'Ouessant cable ship left Capo Verde last week and will arrive in the Gulf of Guinea this Wednesday.
Goldman Sachs, the lead for the public offering, justified the $150 IPO price based on the assumption that SpaceX 2025 revenues of $18.67 billion would grow to $474 billion in 2030, including the AI division, which generated $3 billion in 2025, growing to $322 billion in 2030. Given that most of of the AI division's data center space has been leased to third parties in the last several months,…
Keppel is a member of the Bifrost Consortium. It is essentially arbitraging the difference between per pair consortium cost and what third parties are willing to pay for them. The arbitrage business model comes back to the beginning of telecommunications competition when voice carriers engaged in various kinds of arbitrage to lure customers away from the incumbents. Note Keppel sells no lit…
Stocks of publicly traded companies including Coreweave, META, Microsoft, and Oracle have lost 4% to 39% of their stock market value over the last year. Coreweave's core business is building data centers stocked with GPUs to rent AI service providers for estimation and inference. Obviously, this makes the standard data center look downright capital light. Racks must be populated with servers and…
NTT and Mitsui Leasing have teamed up together with fibre optic cable manufacturer Sumitomo Corporation to fund a 16 fibre pair subsea cable costing $500 million. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the second project on which NTT Data and Mitsui Leasing have cooperated. The high capacity 20 fibre pair Juno cable was the first project. It is unusual to see a large incumbent player like NTT…
MRC: $32.5K. A point: Most Mumbai DCs. Z point: SG3. Cable: IAX.
The well respected wide area network carrier has lit a new, shorter path connecting Milano and Paris data centers. While I believe you should never limit yourself to one vendor, EUNetworks is a very safe choice because it does the fundamentals well and is commercially flexible. The new route spans 1057 kilometers. EU did not provide a latency estimate, but it takes roughly 5.1 microseconds to…
A consortium consisting of TATA Communications, Lightstorm, Microsoft, and Singtel just announced a new 16 fibre pair subsea network tailored to serve the AI data center markets in Hyderabad, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. It includes two Indian landings, one in Southern Chennai and another at Machilipatnum, the latter being the shortest path to Hyderabad. Both Hyderabad and Lumpur host large…
Bypass the Red Sea and Persian Gulf quagmires as well as China and Chinese equipment. No Russian paper. Save at least 40 to 60 milliseconds over subsea routes via the Indian ocean.
SpaceX is the most over-valued stock in the Solar System with a stock valuation 100x current sales The smart money that invested in SpaceX as a private company knows it is wildly over-valued and will sell their stock when the IPO lockup periods expire this autumn. The float, the amount of shares registered for public trading, will increase 20% to 30%. That is a huge increase in supply. Moreover,…
Another 29 Amazon satellites lifted into orbit yesterday. Total Amazon transmission capacity is now 396 Tbps. This is enough to begin initial service beginning of third quarter. The Musk Tribe has consistently told me that Amazon needs thousands of LEOs to begin service. Given Amazon's inked contracts with Delta Airlines, Apple, Vodafone, AT&T, and Hitachi construction company, it appears the…