Thailand's Rising Importance In the Southeast Asia Cable Ecosystem: Part 1

I am seeing a growing number of requests for subsea capacity linking Thailand to Singapore. Thailand is challenging for many reasons. Many consortium members own no fibre beyond the Thai cable landing stations. This leaves them hostage to the country's two main cable landing station operators, TOT and NT, state owned telecom operators, that have exploited their CLS control to charge high backhaul pricing to the carrier neutral data centers. 

The country has three key cable landing stations. Sri Racha, just outside Bangkok, hosts ADC, AAG, and some older cables. In the far South, near Thailand's Malaysian border, a large number of cables land at the Songkhla and Satun cable landing stations. Among the more important high capacity modern cables, AAE1, IAX, and MIST land at Satun. SJC2, AAE1, MVISTA, APG, SEA-H2X, and TIS use the Songkhla CLS.

As you can readily infer from the map, backhaul pricing from the South to Bangkok is quite high due to the distance and terrain. The terrain consists of dense tropical vegetation plus mountains and the coasts are themselves geologically unstable. Moreover, the narrow land bridge means limited physical diversity. Best practice is that the CLS backhaul should be a fully diverse ring so that a fibre cut leads to automatic failover. Obviously, geography does not cooperate in this case.

So despite a huge number of cable systems landing in Thailand, pricing remains quite high with 100Gs often being quoted in the $30K range on three year contracts. I have seen pricing as low as $6,500 a month for a 100G between Thai CLS and Singapores Equinix sites, but the Last Mile blows the great wet segment pricing out the window. TikTok has compounded the the high pricing by taking a couple terabits off the market from Chinese carriers as part of its grand $25 billion data center investment spanning Bangkok and the Samut Prakan and Chachoengsao provinces.

Most Layer 1 requests that I have seen aim to reach Bangkok Telehouse, a carrier neutral data center that has become a focal point or water hole for the competitive Thai telecommunications community. One alternative to the usual transport suspects is the Vietnam/Singapore terrestrial cable, which has a Telehouse Bangkok POP. Its pricing is in the mid-20K range for a 100G wave linking SG1 or Global Switch Singapore to Telehouse on a 3 year contract. It is a substantial discount to end-to-end subsea cable pricing because it bypasses the cable landing stations. Now, some respected analysts have told me it is a high outage route. But I've seen the two year outage history for one provider of this route. It's pretty good. Outages are far and few between. The longest repair was 15 hours. Compare that with a subsea cable outages that will last a minimum of one or two weeks in the best circumstances.

Map of Southeast Asia's Subsea Cables With A Focus On Thailand

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