Groundwave Weekly — Jun 11, 2026

Iran's internet is now being measured in hours rather than days — IranWire's counter crossed 816 of them this week — and the "partial restoration" from late May increasingly looks like a pressure valve bolted onto a permanent tiered-access architecture. Meanwhile, the physical layer of the internet is being rebuilt with geopolitics baked into the routing: a European consortium is racing to lay the first petabit-class North Sea cable, Japan formalized a $1 billion intra-Asia cable that conspicuously skirts Chinese waters, and the FCC quietly proposed forcing operators to rip Chinese equipment out of cables already on the ocean floor. The throughline this week is sovereignty — who controls the wires, who gets to use them, and who decides when they go dark.

• Protected Tactical SATCOM–Global (PTS-G) (U.S. Space Force / Viasat / Intelsat): First two operational anti-jam GEO satellites awarded under a combined $437.7M contract, carrying the Protected Tactical Waveform in X-band and military Ka-band.
• AWS-3 spectrum (Auction 113) (FCC): 200 mid-band licenses across 1695–1710, 1755–1780, and 2155–2180 MHz went live for bidding June 2 — the first FCC spectrum auction in four years.
• Lightweight Universal Codec (LUC) (DARPA): Special notice issued June 5 for a single encoder-decoder built on MIT's GRAND algorithm, designed to decode virtually any error-correction standard — present or future.
• I-AM Cable (NTT DATA / Sumitomo / JA Mitsui Leasing): New operating company formed for an 8,100 km, 16-fiber-pair (320 Tbps) intra-Asia cable using Space Division Multiplexing.
• ALC submarine cable landing (China Telecom): The Asia Link Cable completed its Hong Kong landing, the first international fiber of China's 15th Five-Year Plan.

Ordinary access to the global internet inside Iran remains stuck at roughly one percent, according to NetBlocks. The blackout has so degraded information flow that citizens can't reliably receive attack warnings or reach relatives. IranWire is counting the renewed blackout phase in hours — it crossed 816 this week. Iran's Minister of Communications has acknowledged the shutdown costs the economy $35.7 million a day; independent estimates put the true figure, including indirect costs, closer to $70–80 million.

The architecture is the real story. The minority still connected are either state-whitelisted or paying exorbitant sums for proxy connections that survive hours before being killed. Per Al Jazeera, a government spokeswoman said only those who can "get the voice out" — top officials, state-affiliated figures, news agencies — are permitted online. That is not a restoration. It's a tiered-access sovereign internet, live and operational. The observable signal: if connectivity stays below 20% of pre-shutdown levels through June 18, the "restoration" was theater, and the model becomes an exportable template.

A petabit per second is 1,000 terabits — roughly ten times the capacity of most major subsea cables running today. IOEMA-1 Holding B.V. announced a partnership with APTelecom to commercialize the IOEMA-1 system: a 24-fiber-pair, ~1,600 km, petabit-class cable connecting the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, and the UK, with a ready-for-service target of Q1 2029.

The timing is deliberate. Per the IPTP analysis, submarine cable investment is projected to reach $9.80 billion by 2029, up from $7.96 billion in 2023, with AI training clusters as a major driver — compute farms generating data volumes existing cables weren't built to carry. If IOEMA-1 lands first, it sets the bandwidth pricing floor for Northern Europe for a decade. If it slips, it joins the long list of ambitious European infrastructure announcements that arrive years late. The signal to watch: anchor customers under contract before year-end. No anchors, no cable.

NTT DATA, Sumitomo Corporation, and JA Mitsui Leasing have established Intra-Asia Marine Networks Co., Ltd. to build and operate the Intra-Asia Marine Cable connecting Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore, with branches to Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The 8,100 km system adopts Space Division Multiplexing — packing up to 16 fiber pairs (32 cores) per cable for roughly 320 terabits per second of total capacity.

The routing is the story. The published path traverses the South China Sea while conspicuously avoiding Chinese-controlled waters — a deliberate signal that Tokyo now treats infrastructure neutrality as a strategic asset. Japan is positioning itself as the Switzerland of submarine cables. If Washington responds with co-investment or a security review, that neutral-hub posture has been formally accepted as a Western asset. If not, it's a billion-dollar bet in a contested corridor with no great-power backstop. Watch the Philippines and Taiwan landing points for U.S. interest.

The U.S. Space Force awarded Viasat and Intelsat contracts worth a combined $437.7 million for the first two operational satellites under Protected Tactical SATCOM–Global (PTS-G) — a system built to keep forces connected when an adversary is actively trying to break the link. Per Breaking Defense, the satellites will sit in geosynchronous orbit, providing tactical communications in X-band and military Ka-band, and will carry the Protected Tactical Waveform, the anti-jam signal family designed to survive a denied environment.

This is communications architecture for a war where interference is assumed, not exceptional. Commercial LEO constellations like Starlink get the attention, but they aren't survivable in a peer fight without hardened military alternatives running alongside. The new spacecraft take over part of the encrypted tactical role associated with the aging Advanced Extremely High Frequency system. The signal to watch: if the Space Force names a second protected-SATCOM contractor before Q3, genuine redundancy survives. If SpaceX remains sole source elsewhere in the architecture, concentration risk becomes a Congressional hearing waiting to happen.

You can tell a market is up for grabs when Nvidia shows up and says, essentially, "nice radio business you have there." Light Reading reported on June 8 that Nvidia is working on a chip aimed at the 6G radio unit itself — the piece that handles real-time signal work near the antenna, where timing, power, and physics are unforgiving.

Nvidia already has an AI-RAN story. A radio-unit chip is a bigger statement: no longer about helping telecom run smarter workloads, but about shaping the next generation of base-station hardware. The real 6G battle may start in the silicon supply chain before the standard is even finished. Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and Samsung are now exposed to semiconductor-industry logic, where scale and developer ecosystems matter as much as telecom pedigree. This is a plan, not a fielded product — but the strategic implication is sharp. Watch whether the incumbent RAN vendors embrace this, resist it, or quietly copy it.

Most people picture submarine cables as "fiber in the ocean." The physics are more interesting. NEC and NTT have trialled multicore fiber — twelve optical paths packed within a standard outer-diameter strand, against the single path conventional cables carry — transmitting hundreds of terabits across 7,280 kilometers.

The hard problem multicore fiber solves is crosstalk: cram multiple signal paths into one strand and they interfere. The Japanese team beat it with a decoding algorithm at transoceanic distance, which means this isn't a lab curiosity — it's deployable. If multicore fiber goes commercial, it doesn't just raise capacity; it rewrites the economics, because you can upgrade existing routes without laying new cable. That's the difference between a $1 billion new-build and a hardware swap on infrastructure already on the seafloor. The signal: NEC's commercial deployment timeline. Demonstrated successfully, unproven at scale — for now.

On June 4, the FCC released a fact sheet for a new proceeding on submarine cable landing license rules — the second major order in roughly a year. It strengthens national-security conditions on licensees, but the attached further notice goes further: the Commission is proposing to require applicants to certify they won't use equipment from any entity "owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a foreign adversary," and is seeking comment on requiring existing licensees to remove existing covered equipment.

That retroactive clause is the sleeper. This isn't just about new cables — it could force operators to rip Chinese-made submarine line terminal equipment out of systems already in service. The FCC is simultaneously funding terrestrial rip-and-replace (with Auction 113 proceeds earmarked for the reimbursement program) while building the legal architecture for an undersea version. If the retroactive provision survives the comment period, the industry response will be fierce and the precedent global. Watch the docket.

This week the internet's nervous system got rerouted around China by a billion-dollar Japanese cable, an Iranian government decided 816 hours of darkness was a feature, and Nvidia eyed the one piece of the telecom stack it doesn't yet own — the antenna's own brainstem. The funniest part is that while diplomats give speeches about digital sovereignty, the actual map is being redrawn by whoever's willing to overbuild fiber behind a less-famous beach and certify, in triplicate, that none of their hardware answers to Beijing. Build accordingly.

Forward this to the friend who still thinks the cloud lives in the sky and not on the ocean floor.

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