SMW6 Cable Will Shake Up The Competition

Number of Fibre Pairs: 12.
Initial Capacity Design: 128 Tbps. 
Type of Cable System: Hybrid consortium/open cable model. Bharti owns 1 pair. Rest of capacity ownership is fixed percentage of lit. 
RFS: 1Q2025.
End-To-End Latency:130 ms RTD. Express route. 
Customer Profile: General bandwidth and financial trading firms.
Key Consortium Members: China Unicom, Singtel, Bharti, Orange, Telin, Telekom Malaysia. 

The SWM6 cable is expected to have a round trip latency of only 130 milliseconds between the key Marseille/Singapore end points. This contrasts with 135 ms RTD for AAE1's express route which bypasses Djibouti. To network designers and planners this is a big deal and for financial trading firms it is a huge deal as a millisecond is worth tens of millions of dollars in additional profits over the course of several days. I expect to see latency sensitive Layer 1 customers migrate from AAE1, whose express route is currently the shortest path between Marseille and Singapore, to the new Speed Demon on the block, SMW6. It will be interesting to observe the market dynamics. Obviously, the SMW6 consortium was targeting AAE1 as slicing 5 milliseconds off these geographically constrained paths is very difficult. It cannot be fortuitous. 

SWM6 is also a Bandwidth Leviathan, which I define as a cable whose initial design capacity is 100 Tbps or higher. SWM6 easily surpasses that hurdle as it is designed to do 128 Tpbs day one on its 10 fibre pairs using spatial division multiplexing. Note that subsea cables always end up doing much better than the intial expectations as initial estimates are very conservative. Design capacity is based often on a worst case scenario using current technology. But terminal equipment technology improves overtime, particularly the digital signal processors that correct for chromatic dispersion and other nonlinearities. DSPs have shrunk from 40 nanometers in 2010 to 3 nanometers today. Moore's law at its finest. 

Consortium owners include Bangladesh Submarine Company, Bharti Airtel, China Unicom, Djibouti Telecom (PTT), Mobily (Saudi Arabia competitive mobile provider), Orange, Singtel, Sri Lanka Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Telekom Malaysia, Telin, TransWorld Associates (competitive Pakistani carrier), and Batelco. An extension, not shown on the map, is a branching unit to hit the key countries in the Persian Gulf, including Oman and UAE. Bharti's ambition to be a global player is illustrated by the fact that they purchased a fibre pair on the consortium cable, which is extremely rare. I believe Bharti 'bribed' the consortium into making an exception for it by providing new CLS facilities in Mumbai and Chennai and also co-building four fibre pairs between Chennai and Mumbai. Not clear to me whether these four pairs are a terrestrial Indian route or part of the subsea cable. 

Map of SMW6 Fibre Optic Cable

Map of proposed Persian Gulf extension to SWM6



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