Why Cable Landing Stations Matter

When Bloomberg set out to explain the high-risk, high-reward world of undersea cables, the story didn't stay underwater. It came ashore in Wall Township, New Jersey. NJFX was honored to be part of the segment, which looked at the cables that carry the world's data and the buildings that keep them running. Bloomberg's cameras followed NJFX CEO Gil Santaliz and Peder Nærbø, CEO of Norwegian infrastructure builder Bulk Infrastructure, through the campus to show how traffic is rerouted to keep data moving when a cable goes down.

“There's an outage. That's why we come to places like the New Jersey Fiber Exchange that interconnects with six or seven of these different subsea cables.” Peder Nærbø, CEO, Bulk Infrastructure, on Bloomberg TV

The segment made a point our industry knows well but the public rarely sees: a subsea cable is only as reliable as the place where it lands.

The cable is only half the story

Subsea cables carry the vast majority of the world's international communications and an enormous share of global financial activity. Every one of those systems has to come out of the water somewhere, and the building it lands in becomes the bridge between an ocean of capacity and every terrestrial network that needs it.

The risks are real. As Bloomberg reported, most of us only hear about undersea cables when there's an interruption, and that happens about 200 times a year. Cable faults, ship anchors, geopolitical tension and a global shortage of repair vessels all put pressure on these systems. Analysts consistently point out that the greatest exposure falls on places that depend on just one or two routes. If the bridge between sea and land is fragile, the whole route is fragile.

What makes a landing station purpose-built

Landing international capacity safely takes a facility designed for that job from the ground up.

• 01

  Location. Cable landing geography is not negotiable. Cables come ashore where the seabed, shoreline and permitting allow, and the facility has to be there. A station close to the beach manhole but outside dense urban chokepoints gives operators both reach and resilience.

• 02

  Physical security. Subsea systems are critical infrastructure. Controlled access, layered security and around-the-clock monitoring protect the equipment that terminates and powers each cable.

• 03

  Redundant power and cooling. Submarine line terminal equipment and the networks connected to it cannot go dark. A Tier 3 design with concurrently maintainable power and cooling means maintenance and individual failures do not interrupt service.

• 04

  Carrier neutrality. An operator-owned station controls who can reach its cables, and a passive site adds a backhaul leg before any interconnection can happen. A carrier-neutral facility lets every party interconnect directly at the landing point, under one roof.

• 05

  Terrestrial diversity. Capacity that lands on the coast still has to get inland. Multiple, physically diverse fiber paths to major markets keep traffic moving even when one route is cut.

Resilience is an architecture, not a single building

A central theme of the Bloomberg segment is diversity. No single cable, landing point or terrestrial route should be a point of failure. Resilient networks spread risk across multiple systems, multiple landing sites and multiple paths, so that when something breaks, traffic simply reroutes.

That diversity has to continue on land. A subsea cable that lands safely but leaves the coast on a single fiber path has only moved its point of failure inland.

“We've got 26 terrestrial cables that leave NJFX in four directions, aerial, underground, which allow diversity for these subsea cables. Now they have options.” Gil Santaliz, CEO, NJFX, on Bloomberg TV

That is why where a cable lands is a strategic decision for operators, not a real estate one. Landing in a neutral, purpose-built facility with access to several other systems and diverse terrestrial routes gives operators options. Options are what keep data moving during an outage.

An open market at the landing point

NJFX was designed as a carrier-neutral cable landing station campus with a Tier 3 data center on the New Jersey coast in Wall Township. Six to seven subsea cable systems are accessible from the campus, connecting the US East Coast to Europe, South America and Bermuda.

Few cable landing stations operate this way. NJFX is one of a small number that offer a carrier-neutral ecosystem at the landing point itself. That creates an open market: cable owners, carriers, content providers and enterprises choose who they build their network infrastructure with, rather than having that choice made for them by the station's owner.

• HAVFRUE / AEC-2Denmark, Norway, Ireland
• Seabras-1Brazil
• TGN AtlanticUnited Kingdom
• Gemini BermudaBermuda

Inside the campus, carriers, cloud and content providers, financial firms and enterprises interconnect directly with these systems and with each other. Twenty-six terrestrial fiber cables leave the campus in four directions, both aerial and underground. If something happens on land, whether on a highway or a railroad, traffic can be diverted onto a different path. The result is a single location where international capacity, terrestrial networks and customers meet, without the congestion and concentration risk of a dense urban hub.

As demand for data grows, from cloud to AI workloads wherever they run, all of that traffic still depends on the network. The cables, and the buildings they land in, are where that network begins.