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Equinix executive Jim Poole said subsea cable owners are increasingly looking to terminate their cables inside data centers
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Hyperscalers are helping drive this trend
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New cables are also trending toward higher fiber pair counts
Equinix revealed it is serving as the landing gateway for Southern Cross’ new trans-Pacific NEXT subsea cable system, which connects Australia to Los Angeles in the U.S.
Jim Poole, Equinix’s VP of business development, told Silverlinings the arrangement reflects a broader industry shift away from traditional cable landing stations in favor of termination points directly inside data centers.
In the past, subsea cables would make landfall in concrete bunkers which contained only enough room to accommodate power feed equipment and the lasers needed for data transmissions across the cable. From there, data would be backhauled via a terrestrial service provider’s network into a big city for interconnection.
Now, Poole said, subsea cable owners are increasingly looking to terminate in data centers close to the coast.
This shift gives them direct access to interconnections with hundreds of carriers, hyperscaler gateways and enterprise customer networks, cutting down on latency. It also allows the subsea cable owners to eliminate the backhaul costs that were previously passed along to their customers, he said.
Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are some the most prominent users of and investors in subsea cable infrastructure according to TeleGeography, and in recent years have shifted away from purchasing wholesale capacity in favor of laying their own cables. In fact, Google this week just announced plans to run a new trans-Atlantic subsea cable called Nuvem from Portugal to Bermuda and the U.S. The cable joins the Grace Hopper, Dunant, Equiano and Curie cables it recently launched.
“The hyperscalers like it because the hyperscalers will tend to establish things like caching infrastructure adjacent to their cables,” Poole said of terminating cables within data centers. “They can do that and they can basically collocate that equipment so they cut down on having to backhaul that.”
According to Poole, Equinix’s first implementation of the data center landing model – which is also called an open cable model – was for the Monet cable system which connects the U.S. to Brazil. That cable is partially owned by Google and went live in 2017.
“It’s not as if the old way of doing things has gone away completely but I would say if it’s technically feasible, almost all of the new builds that we see happening are taking advantage of this kind of model because it gives a better experience to the [cable] owners," Poole said.
Over the last three years, Equinix has won 50 subsea cable projects and continues to track over 60 projects with go-live dates within the next two years. So, you can expect more open cable model deployments to come.
Capacity crunch
One other trend Poole highlighted is the move toward a larger number of fiber pairs within subsea cables to keep up with capacity demands. Poole noted subsea cables used to contain anywhere from four to eight pairs of fiber. But now newer systems that are replacing aging cables are looking at 20 pairs or more. That’s in part because cable owners are having to think way ahead given cables have a 20-25 year lifespan.
“For Southern Cross, the initial system that was built back in 1999 was 18 TB of capacity,” Poole said. “This new cable system they just activated is 72 TB….the tendency is to go higher and higher.”
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