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Insights

Insights & view points from industry professionals.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

Geopolitical think tanks and maritime strategists routinely sound the alarm over the vulnerabilities of the global internet. The narrative is well‑rehearsed: “Between 15% and 17% of all global internet traffic passes through a narrow bottleneck in the Red Sea and Egypt, representing over 90% of direct communications between Europe and Asia.” Headlines scream that a single severed anchor in the Red Sea or an asymmetric naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz could plunge Eurasia into a digital dark age.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

In a landmark demonstration of long-distance seismic sensing, Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) has successfully detected an earthquake occurred in Japan on April 20, 2026, using its SMART Climate Change (CC) solution—operating not from a nearby station, but from the company's headquarters in Les Ulis, France, over 9000 kilometers away from the earthquake origin.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

For decades, Canada has operated as a digital appendage of the United States. Despite its status as a G7 power, Canada’s role in the global subsea cable map has been remarkably invisible. However, as of April 2026, a perfect storm of geopolitical friction, shifting regulatory tides, and a re-evaluation of national security is forcing Ottawa to rethink its international network architecture.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

On April 22, 2026, GCI Holdings LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of GCI Liberty, Inc., announced the conclusion of a definitive agreement to acquire 100% of the equity in Quintillion from Grain Management LLC. The transaction represents a pivotal consolidation of Alaska's telecommunications infrastructure, merging Quintillion’s 1,800+ miles of existing Arctic subsea fiber and terrestrial fiber and ~1,500 miles of planned fiber expansion with GCI’s statewide network and operations, advancing GCI’s mission to deliver reliable connectivity for Alaskans.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

A recent briefing by the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) argues that the central challenge facing Europe’s subsea telecommunications network is not hybrid attacks or physical sabotage, but rather the accelerating concentration of ownership and operational control in the hands of non-EU actors, particularly US hyperscalers.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

According to Expresso, the Portugal news agency, the United States has intensified diplomatic pressure on Portugal to enhance security for transatlantic submarine cables, warning that failure to protect critical communications infrastructure could jeopardize billions in technology investments from American giants including Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

A recent Wall Street Journal report, "Inside the Race to Protect Submarine Cables From Sabotage," has laid bare the escalating physical and geopolitical threats to the world's subsea fiber-optic network, revealing a global infrastructure at risk and the urgent efforts to defend it. The WSJ report aligns directly with the legislative rationale driving the U.S. Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026. There is a critical inconsistency between the US narrative and the public reassessment by European intelligence, the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service (Supo), that investigations into Baltic Sea cable incidents found no evidence of deliberate Russian state activity.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

Cerberus Capital Management has successfully closed a $2.3 billion single-asset continuation vehicle (CV) for SubCom (Subsea Communications), marking one of the largest-ever secondary transactions in the subsea cable industry and significantly extending the private equity firm's ownership of America's sole submarine cable manufacturer.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights

The European Commission has formally approved the acquisition of Telecom Italia Sparkle (Sparkle) by a consortium comprising Italy's Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) and infrastructure operator Retelit, removing a major regulatory hurdle for the €700 million transaction.

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Winston Qiu
Category: Insights
On April 9, 2026, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) (tentatively titled Protecting Against National Security Threats in Domestic Telecommunications Service) for a vote scheduled on April 30, 2026. The FCC NPRM seeks to bar China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom from operating data centers and Points of Presence (PoPs) in the U.S., prohibit interconnection with Chinese carriers, and extend restrictions to any carrier using Huawei/ZTE equipment. This is the most significant expansion of the "Covered List" regime since 2019 — transforming voluntary guidelines under "Clean Network" policy into mandatory legal exclusion.

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