Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Prior to Equiano and 2Africa, the African continent was arguably one of the most difficult places to do telecom wholesale. But India is catching up. The African continent has two open cable systems whereas India has none. Although LightStorm 's mission is to create and operate carrier neutral cable landing stations in India, I am not aware of any major cables in planning that will use them. Unfortunately, Tata and Bharti Airtel still control most  cable landing stations. And they are typically the only carriers that can provide back haul from the CLS to the rest of the country. Hence they have de facto monopolies on the subsea cables that they land. As a result a 100G wave from Mumbai to Marseille generally costs about $65K per month on the older systems, which is well above African market pricing for routers of similtar distance. Capetown to Portugal is now lower 30s at the 100G levl.  However, there is one international subsea cable that offers hope for buyers. The Bay of Bengal

The least expensive Mumbai/Singapore cable is BBG ( Bay of Bengal Gateway ) and it enjoys the advantage of also directly connecting Singapore to Oman and the UAE. So most bypass route solutions use it. So the standard choice is to buy Oman/Singapore on BBG. Once the traffic reaches Oman a plethora of options present themselves. The traffic can be routed overland to Frankfurt via a consortium of carriers that have created the Ameers or Ameer2 terrestrial cable. Or one can hop on a subsea cable to Iraq or Iran, traverse it, and then forward through Turkey to Europe. There are many operators offering bypass routes from UAE and Oman to Europe. Most are pitching resiliency or low latency. Some of them offer route protected 100G service.  The Ameers cable (see the Orange marketing below) is a Turk Telekom led carrier consortium that has stitched together their fibre networks to provide an end-to-end service. This reflects Turk Telekom's vision of being a bridge between Europe and the Mi