GCHQ proof
Alcatel-Lucent have insisted that all messages on the cable are in French rendering them completely unintelligible to British intelligence
Construction has begun on the next major submarine cable, which when it's completed in 2016 will provide a big increase in capacity between South-East Asia and Europe. Sea-Me-We-5 has a design capacity of 24 Tbps, and will run 20,000 km to link Singapore at one end and France at the other. Presuming there are no construction …
Nevermind. Maybe the Ozzies will be able to catch some bandwidth from an occasional wayward Loon balloon.
With the amount of internet censorship currently being put in place in Thailand by the military junta, I don't expect that this cable will provide a much improved internet experience to people there. Traffic has has started slowing down dramatically since the Great Leader has announced that no effort will be spared to stamp out "inadequate" network activity. Can't help but thinking this is due to filtering equipment being put online (by incompetent and lazy people as usual in government agencies there).
And in the foreseeable future I would definitely count Thailand among the potentially explosive countries that might cause trouble to this shiny new data pipe. Especially since according to the cable map found online, it lands in the unrest-ridden south.
Fortunately, it seems to be an end point.
Wouldn't this be the ideal time for the US to send the Jimmy Carter down to tap that cable? They won't be able to notice it when it isn't yet operational, solving the (potential) issues with bugging it later.
That assumes Alcatel-Lucent isn't directly cooperating with the NSA to build in the taps and save us the effort of doing it surreptitiously (though the NSA is so paranoid they'd probably tap it on their own as well "just in case" Alcatel-Lucent changes their mind down the road and turns off the build-in tap!)
There isn't really any need to do super ninja submarine cable taps (which are rather trickier with a modern fibre cable than they were int he days of telephones) when the cable lands at a dozen countries who are all very willing to assisting their friends .