Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Key Observations Lots of Faster cable capacity available. Third fastest Japan/US sysrem. TY4/1 Wilshire or CLS/DC combinations available. Figure $13.5 MRC to $17.5K MRC depending on exact end points on a 1 year contract.  Chinese carriers dominate AAE1 and they report no capacity left. Other Asian carriers were reselling Chinese capacity. Hence their cupboards are now bare as well.  Only 10G capacity available. SMW5 is also almost fully depleted. At this point it is a so-called 'diversity play' for AAE1. Despite the tight Red Sea lane fit and the fact that Egypt is single point of failure.  Peace cable is not ready til 1Q2025, but pricing is available and orders are being taken. One SVP of sales told me that Peace will put downward pressure on the Marseille/Singapore route. I do think that will happen, but not by itself. It is Peace plus SWM6 that will temporarily lower prices. Temporary because AAE1 and SWM5 are depleted, but demand is steadily growing. No end to the demand ts

Number of Fibre Pairs: 12. Initial Capacity Design: 128 Tbps.  Type of Cable System: Hybrid consortium/open cable model. Bharti owns 1 pair. Rest of capacity ownership is fixed percentage of lit.  RFS: 1Q2025. End-To-End Latency:130 ms RTD. Express route.  Customer Profile: General bandwidth and financial trading firms. Key Consortium Members: China Unicom, Singtel, Bharti, Orange, Telin, Telekom Malaysia.  The SWM6 cable is expected to have a round trip latency of only 130 milliseconds between the key Marseille/Singapore end points. This contrasts with 135 ms RTD for AAE1's express route which bypasses Djibouti. To network designers and planners this is a big deal and for financial trading firms it is a huge deal as a millisecond is worth tens of millions of dollars in additional profits over the course of several days. I expect to see latency sensitive Layer 1 customers migrate from AAE1, whose express route is currently the shortest path between Marseille and Singapore, to the n

I've seen a lot of interest in routes bypassing the Red Sea and Egypt. Not surprising given the triple whammy of AAE1 , EIG, and Seacom/Tata outages lasting over four months. It is possible to devise end-to-end Frankfurt/Singapore and Marseille/Singapore bypass routes by using subsea cables that connect Mumbai or Oman to Singapore. That part is relatively easy and straightforward. As the chart below shows, there are lots of subsea cables connecting the two great cities.  The key India/Singapore cables include 1. I2I. Bharti Airtel cable.  2. Tata Indicom.  3. Mist (2025). 4. AAE1. 5. Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) 6. India Asia Express (IAX). 7. SWM4, SWM5, and soon SWM6.  8. Several more.  Neither I2I nor Indicom are useful in constructing bypass routes because their owners charge extremely high prices. The Bay of Bengal cable is standard in bypass solutions for two reasons. Its capacity is less expensive and it also lands in Oman, thereby completely avoiding the problems associate

Seacom went live two days ago and EIG is now being repaired. The repairs revealed that an anchor damaged the cables and hence vindicate my theory that the Rubymar was responsible. Bloomberg quoted me on this issue shortly after the outages started The Houthis hit this ship with a missile and it dropped anchor so the crew could evacuate in life boats. It then drifted over 20 kilometers scrapping the sea floor with its huge anchor which probably weighs five to ten tons. Although Red Sea cables are usually buried, the sea floor is generally soft silt and a heavy anchor will simply sink through the silt and then plow it as the ship drifts. In general, most subsea outages around the world happen on the shallow continental shelf. That means shallow coastal waters where ships damage them via fishing or anchor dropping. Ships drop anchor to achieve a full stop, to stabilize it in transit during bad weather or steady it during an evacuation like the Rubymar.  The real question surrounding the