Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

NTT and Mitsui Leasing have teamed up together with fibre optic cable manufacturer Sumitomo Corporation to fund a 16 fibre pair subsea cable costing $500 million. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the second project on which NTT Data And Mitsui Leasing have cooperated. The very high capacity Juno cable was the first project. It is unusual to see a large incumbent player like NTT doing a subsea cable project with a non-telecom company. But the advantages are clear. Mitsui will contribute cash, but not play a major role in design or wholesale commercials. So Mitsui not only reduces NTT's risk by sharing funding requirements, but it gives NTT a free hand in decision making. One lesson that has become perfectly clear is that large carrier consortiums increase the likelihood of deployment delays because decisions require consensus. Moreover, the consensus requirement leads to frequent vetos on new ideas among the ultra-cautious member representatives. Imagine the chall...

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 Be...