Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

1. Fully diverse and fully buried dark fibre pairs or individual strands available for lease or IRU between IColo1, IColo2, Telehouse, Nyali Exchange, Seacom CLS, and 2Africa Shanzu CLS. Unlike other providers, the fiber connects to the data centers via buried conduits. Not power poles. End to end burial. 2. Sixty Euros per kilometer on three year lease deals. 3. New ultra-loss fiber manufactured in 2024. 4. Repair SLA based on 4 hours mean time to repair.

 At the 2026 Submarine Networks World in Singapore Ciena pitched the MOFN business model, the managed optical fiber network. This is a network dedicated to a single customer like a hyperscaler, large enterprise, government, and the like. It involves dedicated fibre pairs and equipment. Very often the customer buys the equipment and ships it to the network operator. It is quite common in Africa where network operators provide such services to the American Tech Giants. But carriers have often found that hyperscaler forecasts of capacity needs are often wildly off. The result is poor MOFN economics and low rates of return.

Ciena seems correct when it asserts massive growth from here to 2035. Heck, that is a 35 year Internet trend. But claiming that traffic will be 85% AI sounds like a very bad forecast. Right now the world is spending $2 trillion each year on AI infrastructure versus $100 billion in AI service revenues. A pretty big gap. We have experienced cycles of excess technology enthusiasm over the last 150 years and bullish forecasts have almost always proved wrong. 

The second Kenyan data center (IXAfrica Nairobi) I've visited with a large Starlink presence. IXAfrica is on Nairobi's outskirts on Mombasa Road and is pretty damn difficult to find as I and the taxi driver learned to our dismay. 😃 Starlink normally requires 20 degrees of line of sight in all directions for its earth stations. A condition clearly violated here. I suspect Starlink is using free space lasers to transmit traffic to satellites high enough in the sky to reach this limited-line-of-sight facility. From my point of view all this talk about Starlink building a parallel Internet infrastructure qualifies as nonsense. It is just another niche ISP using a different and bandwidth-limited Last Mile infrastructure to reach end users. No revolution. Just hype.

Subco announced recently four new 24 fibre pair cables connecting Australia to Japan, Singapore, Guam, and the Continental US. This is obviously a multi-billion dollar undertaking. Now Subco owns the Oman-Australia and SMAP cables. It is also a consortium member on Indigo West and Indigo Central. So I believe Subco has significant retained earnings. Nonetheless, these new cables together probably come close to the $2 billion construction dollar mark. Moreover, hyperscalers don't buy capacity prior to successful execution. Indications of interest, yes, but not contractual commitments. LOIs are soft commitments. So this is a daring undertaking by one of the most successful private operators on subsea cables. For those new to the industry, a private operator generally is a wholesale player that owns an entire cable as opposed to a consortium member or a hyperscaler. However, the historical track record for private operators has not been great. So far Subco has an exception. By 2001, p...

Looks very similar in design to our present fibre optic subsea cable networks. For example, the Red Sea is a telegraph cable highway and Singapore is a telegraph cable hub. However, the Persian Gulf is not important because hydrocarbons won't be discovered there for another 30 years. Note the cable connecting South Africa to Australia, which is reminiscent of Google's Umoja cable. Note the cables connecting Argentina and Brazil to Senegal and South Africa, but Nigeria, a major hub today, has no connectivity.