Sparkle & Turkcell Building New Subsea Cable Into Turkey

Turkey has bee a very tough market for global ISPs. Until EXA lit terrestrial fibre a few years ago across the Bulgaria's border with Turkey, 100G pricing was $15K per month and above. EXA now dominates the key Frankfurt to Istanbul route with lower pricing. But the situation is not ideal. Physical diversity is an illusion across the narrow border with one conduit system carrying much of the international traffic. Sparkle's old Mednautilus system does provide an alternative to the land routes, but it's primacy has been too high for foreign ISPs in Turkey to flourish.

Sparkle has signed a memorandum of understanding with Turkcell to build a subsea cable that will land in the Instanbul suburd of Izmir and at Chania, Greece. The yet unnamed cable will interconnect at Chania, a Greek island, to the BlueMed cable which will carry the traffic to Marseille, Milano, and other key telecom hubs. We have few details on the cable itself other than a target design throughput of 25 terabits per pair. The distance between the two cities is 425 kilometers, which really requires undersea optical amplifiers. My guess is that given the high fixed costs of deployment, the cable will be at least 16 fibre pairs. Anything less makes little sense. So we can confidently predict that the subsea network will easily achieve 400 Tbps. This project will sharply improve the resiliency of Turkey's telecom ecosystem. I expect it also to lower Layer 3 bandwidth prices due to lower Tier 2 ISP operating costs. Turkcell's involvement is part of a large trend of rapidly growing mobile operators becoming important subsea cable players. Vodafone, Mobily, and Bharti are good examples. This reflects the growing importance of data for mobile customers as well as the fact that mobile operators can provide an alternative to the incumbent for landing rights and back haul. Mobile operators are often the backdoor into highly regulated markets.