Subsea Cables & Southeastern Europe: MedNautilus, EXA/TAP, And Isalink

Three subsea cables dominate Southeastern Europe. Telecom deregulation came late to this corner of the European continent. Greece was only deregulated in 2000. Turkey is only partly deregulated today in 2024. Although the Southeast was one of the richest areas on the planet during the Roman and Ottoman Empires, today it is very poor. Greece's per capita GDP is 23,800 Euros versus the EU mean of 35,500€. Even the waters are challenging as a good part of the Aegean sea is shallow and ships are everywhere. Mountains make terrestrial fibre builds very challenging. 

Sparkle's six fibre pair MedNautilus cable has dominated the Southeast since it went live in 2001. It is designed as a ring so that route protection is an option. The cable went live as a 10G backbone in 2001. Today its capacity is 3.84 Tbps with a 100G backbone. MedNautilus connects Sicily to Israel via a ring topology and offers the same protection for Greece. MedNautilus also connects Turkey to Europe via a subsea landing near Istanbul. For a long time Turkish international connectivity was a Turk Telekom and MedNautilus duopoly. Frankly, this cable is old and approaching the quarter century mark. It has only a few years left. Its Istanbul pricing is breathtakingly high. 


Mednautilus subsea cable map

Two new players have emerged on the scene over the last several years. EXA has built two terrestrial routes into Istanbul and partnered with the owners of the Trans-Adriatic pipeline (TAP) to create a third route diverse to the other two. This hybrid terrestrial/subsea offers a much lower latency, higher bandwidth roue than the aging Mednautilus. EXA pitches it as a premium service. 

EXA TAP Subsea Project

The dark horse, which is not well known, is the Ionian cable. Its owner is Isalink, an independent operator owned in turn by an infrastructure fund. It is a 24 fibre pair unrepeatered system that was laid mostly in waters exceeding 1000 meters deep to protect the cable from the usual suspects such as ships. In addition, the cable was buried one meter deep in the shallow waters on both the Italian and Greek sides. Per fibre pair throughput is a high 15 Tbps. So this system is a Bandwidth Leviathan with a 360 Tbps aggregate transmission rate. The cable is complemented by two terrestrial fibre rings so that customers are not stranded at the cable landing stations. Rome, Milano, Bari, Thessaloniki, and Athens are all on-net. 

Map Of The Ionian Subsea Cable Serving Southeast EuropeI 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breaking Story: Facebook Building Subsea Cable That Will Encompass The World

Image
Several sources have whispered in my ear that META is planning a new 16 fibre pair cable that will encompass the world going from the US East Coast to the US West Coast via the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The most ambitious subsea project ever undertaken. I do not know the exact routing. I know that the cable will launch from the American East Coast and will go down the West African Coast to South Africa and then head straight to Mumbai. It is not clear if Europe will be online or not. From Mumbai it will head straight to Australia and then up to the US West Coast. I speculate that there may be branching units to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But the basic routing is US/South Africa/India/Australia/US. What is not clear is if there will be branching units to add more countries to the cable.  This semi-secret cable reflects META's desire for network resiliency given the four month Red Sea down time that AAE-1 and other subsea cables suffered during the first half
Read more

Facebook's Semi-Secret W Cable

Image
 A few days ago I wrote that Facebook was planning a new subsea cable directly linking the US East Coast to South Africa, then up to India, onward to Australia, and finally to the US West Coast. Clearly resiliency is a big theme. It avoids Lisbon, Marseille, Egypt, the Red Sea, and Singapore. All choke points due to their telecom hub status. Note that the map below shows lots of branching units, but I don't have insider confirmation although they make perfect sense. The cable is 16 fibre pairs.  This cable may be heavily influenced by AI considerations. AI data centres require lots of space and power. The US, South Africa, India, and Australia are good candidates for AI data centres in terms of space. All of them except for South Africa have modern power grids. But South Africa is still the best place on the continent for large scale AI facilities. An AI theme makes particular sense given the cable's high latency. An AI data centre does not directly serve custom
Read more

How To Calculate An IRU Price For a 100G Wavelength

The IRU price should reflect your forecast of future lease revenes. If the current MRC is high and prices have been stable and are expected to remain so, then the opportunity cost of selling an IRU is high. You are sacrificing a lot of lease revenue if you sell that capacity. In this case the upfront IRU price should equal the three year MRC multipled by 4 to 6 years. So if the three year Faster cable MRC is $17K, then 48x to 72x times that number is fair value. So 48*$17K=$816K. Plus a standard 4% annual fee to cover the wavelength's share of maintenance and operations.. So strong markets and tight capacity mean that leasing is more attractive than IRUs to the supplier. Vice versa, the buyers will be desperate to lower their long term costs via an IRU. In my example, $816K divided by 15 years equates to $4500 per month excluding O&M. Bad for the seller. Good for the buyer. That's why so many of you are looking for IRU capacity to resell to your clients, but finding few se
Read more