NTT's Mist Cable RFS Summer of 2025

 NTT is the lead consortium member on a new Indian subsea cable linking Mumbai and Chennai to Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Like most cables these days Mist is a spatial division multiplexing system. It has 12 fibre pairs with aggregate transmission capacity of 240 Tbps. The DWDM backbone is 400G.

Mist is part of a new wave of high capacity, high fibre count subsea cables connecting India to Europe and Southeast Asia that also includes Blue-Raman, IEX, and IAX. Information on their transmission rates is sparse, but their collective throughput is probably at least a half petabit per second and perhaps as high as 750 Tbps. NTT spent about $400 million on the project, which is part of a bigger plan to become a major data center player in India. Indian carriers still largely dominate the local data center business although that is rapidly changing as Equinix makes a concerted push. Undoubtedly, NTT management realized that the main obstacle to thriving Indian data centers is the cost and limited supply of subsea capacity into the country. So NTT is effectively vertically integrating in order to ensure it controls the entire supply chain for its data centers. NTT owns a global Internet backbone ranked fifth globally in terms of AS connectivity which places it just behind GTT and just ahead of Tata Communicatios. So the cable build is not about wholesale connectivity as a standalone profit center. Rather the cable's true purpose is to serve the NTT Internet backbone and its sister data center business.

Like many recent Indian cables Mist lands in both Mumbai and Chennai for the sake of resiliency. It also enables lower latency to end users by creating two highly diverse paths to reach them. The initial 100G wave pricing is expensive according to well placed sources with some estimates as high as $60K a month. I hope pricing comes down because otherwise the cable will do little to help the home grown Indian ISPs. As always, I root for the startup ISPs🙂. Singtel and the OTTs have capacity on the cable. There are probably others as well.

Map of the Mist Undersea Fibre Optic Cable



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 custo...
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