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 Asian telecommunications. 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 in 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 who are currently facing strong competition in landline and mobile services. Often the entrants can move faster because they don't have the bureaucracy-heavy telecom culture of the PTTs (if senior telecom managers get together to draw a horse, it takes 12 weeks and looks like a camel).

MVISTA will be able to do 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 project partners 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 facilitates selling big chunks of capacity to third parties. For the founders, it is a way of getting liquid fast on their investment. For example, Stavian Group's primary goal is not being a subsea cable operator, but rather ensuring the success of its carrier neutral Vietnamese data center. For it, the cable ensures the data center enjoys the cheap connectivity essential to its long term success.

MVISTA's design is quite revealing and interesting. It hugs the South Vietnamese coast 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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