Singapore/Marseille Route Bypass Of Red Sea And Egypt: Part 2

The least expensive Mumbai/Singapore cable is BBG (Bay of Bengal Gateway) and it enjoys the advantage of also directly connecting Singapore to Oman and the UAE. So most bypass route solutions use it. So the standard choice is to buy Oman/Singapore on BBG. Once the traffic reaches Oman a plethora of options present themselves. The traffic can be routed overland to Frankfurt via a consortium of carriers that have created the Ameers or Ameer2 terrestrial cable. Or one can hop on a subsea cable to Iraq or Iran, traverse it, and then forward through Turkey to Europe. There are many operators offering bypass routes from UAE and Oman to Europe. Most are pitching resiliency or low latency. Some of them offer route protected 100G service. 

The Ameers cable (see the Orange marketing below) is a Turk Telekom led carrier consortium that has stitched together their fibre networks to provide an end-to-end service. This reflects Turk Telekom's vision of being a bridge between Europe and the Middle East and Asia. A Bridge Between Worlds. This so-called cable is really a collection of routes with the first known as Ameers and and a newer route called Ameer 2. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of industry skepticism surrounding the route due to its high pricing, regional conflicts, and the question of how well the consortium partners have integrated their respective transport segments into a well functioning end-to-end digital highway. A 100G wavelength from Singapore data center to Frankfurt that uses Ameers or Ameer2 ranges from a low of $115K monthly charge to a high of $145K on a 1 year contract. Similarly, a 10G wave ranges from $25K to $45K on the same term. Given that most wholesale buyers already face high AAE1 and SWM5 pricing due to Egypt transit charges, the prospect of paying at least 4x more for routes that might have high downtime and poor customer service is not particularly inviting. Are there buyers for this route? Yes, but not many. 

The pricing of the Ameers cables shows the lack of realism among its consortium members. It reflects the fact that most high level PTT decision makers are out of touch with the market because they are totally absorbed in their own company politics and rhetoric. When I worked at AT&T in the 90s I noticed most managers knew little about the telecom market, but were enormously versed in the details of AT&T itself. Politics always prevailed, which meant echoing the official line about avoiding price competition. But wholesale capacity is 70% about price with the balance being performance, delivery, and physical diversity. But the premiums that can be charged for the 30% are not tremendous. I learned that well at Hibernia Atlantic, which was at the time the most physically diverse Trans-Atlantic cable. We won deals due to our physical diversity in terms of where the cable was in the sea and land. But there was no significant price premium in the tough wholesale market that prevailed 2001-2020 due to 7 high capacity Atlantic cables. 

GBI (Gulf Bridge International) owns a cable with the same name that allows Oman traffic to be ferried across the Persian gulf to Iraq and then via terrestrial cable across Iraq to Turkey and up to Europe and Frankfurt (invariably the end point for these bypass solutions). See the map below for details. I confess know relatively little about this system, but I would surprised if all the bypass capacity in use via Iran or Iraq across all providers is more than 1 terabit in total.