These two Subco-owned cable systems have experienced ongoing outages that started August 8th. Each has a shunt fault located very near the other in the Perth cable protection zone. This zone extends from shore to a depth of 2000 meters and is over 100 kilometers long. These protection zones can backfire because their width is usually just a nautical mile. So the cables are packed together like sardines and if a ship drags its anchor, then multiple outages are pretty much guaranteed. It raises the question of whether cable protection zones are really a good idea since the level of shipping pretty guarantees cable damage. In a way, cable protection zones violate the principle of resiliency via physical diversity. The most likely suspect in this case is a ship that dragged its anchor across the two cables and damaged the sheath protecting the power conductor from water. A ship has been identified that was in the area at the time the outages began. Cable repairs are slated to be complete August 26th. Accidental damage like this happens way too frequently and there is a need for strong criminal negligence penalties and consistent enforcement in cases like this.
Australia is on the cusp of becoming a hyperscaler telecom hub. Google has played a key role. It is landing numerous cables there. The Humboldt cable will connect Sydney to Santiago with a branching unit to the Fiji islands. Tabua, already in service, connects Queensland, Australia to Fiji, Fiji to Hawaii, and Hawaii to LA. It is a 16 fibre pair cable transmitting at an aggregate rate of 272 Tbps. Google's Talaylink connects Thailand to the Western Australia coast. RFS is 2028. The Bosun cable connects Australia's Northern Coast to Christmas Island. Google is building the Umoja cable. It will connect Perth to South Africa. The Dhivaru project links Oman to Maldives, and then continues to Christmas. Finally, the Honomoana cable has double landings at Melbourne and Sydney. It heads in a Northeasterly direction to San Diego with a New Zealand branch and a French Polynesia landing.
It is clear to me that Google plans to develop a high capacity Australian cloud region and use it to serve not just Australia, but much of Southeast Asia. This simplifies operations by avoiding setting up private data centers across the region. I could see Google's Australia-based cloud serving New Zealand, Pacific islands, New Guinea, Indonesia, and even Singapore. Google is probably also concerned about the almost complete dependence of Southeast Asia on Singapore for Internet traffic exchange. Singapore is a single point of failure in the Southeast Asia telecom ecosystem with 40 cables landing there.
For more details on the Perth outages, click on https://lnkd.in/d5gVqgAj
