The 2028 MVISTA Cable: Likely to Shake Up Southeast Asia

The 16 fibre pair MVISTA project has the potential to disrupt the cozy world of Southeast Asia. The majority shareholder is the Stavian Group, a Vietnamese industrial conglomerate building one of the first carrier neutral data centers in Vietnam. Stavian is a good example of how cash heavy and well established companies are entering the Southeast Asian service provider market in search of their slice of the good life. Another example is Keppel, which began life as a builder of offshore rigs after WW2 and today is a very successful asset manager of real estate, infrastructure (power), and connectivity. Companies outside telecommunications are drawn to subsea cables due to the robust connectivity demand of Southeast Asia. This reflects the region's fast growth, but also a fragmented geography. Many countries are islands like Indonesia, New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore or peninsulas like Thailand and Malaysia. The easiest way to build cost effective communications network is via consortiums using the waterways as the digital arteries. The new entrants don't face the problems of incumbents facing strong competition in areas like landline or mobile service. Often they can move faster because they don't have the bureaucracy heavy telecom culture (if senior telecom managers get together to draw a horse, it takes 12 weeks and looks like a camel).

MVISTA should be able to crank out 320 Tbps day one. If the consortium builds and owns fiber to the Bangkok data centers, it would bring great relief to Thailand's long suffering independent ISPs. Other partners on the project include APTelecom in an advisory and sales role and Japan's Midas Capital providing equity funding. MVISTA is an open cable. An open cable means the ownership is not a percentage of lit capacity, but rather fibre pairs or spectrum. Such a model facilities selling big chunks of capacity to third parties. For the founders, it is a way of getting liquid on their investment. For example, Stavian Group's primary objective is probably not being a subsea cable operator, but rather ensuring the success of its Vietnamese data center. For it, the cable ensures its data center enjoys the cheap connectivity which is crucial to any data center's long term success.

MVISTA's design is quite revealing and interesting. It hugs the South Vietnamese short despite the potential for ships to cause outages to avoid conflict with China's claim to almost 100% of the South China Sea. The cable also offers a relatively low latency path from Northern Thailand to Singapore. Because MVISTA lands in Thailand near Bangkok and also at Songkhla, it is possible to add a terrestrial segment and create a diverse ring for resiliency. Finally, the chart suggests that Singapore will also be part of a ring with the cable landing at Tuas complemented with a Malaysian landing that brings fibre across Singapore's bridges with Malaysia. 

Map of the New MVISTA Fiber Optic Subsea Cable



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