Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The conflict between China and the West is exacerbating bandwidth shortages on key routes like Marseille to Singapore. AAE1 is maxed out just like SWM5. Both will be upgraded this year, but I believe all the incremental capacity will be snatched up even before upgrades are finished and the capacity delivered to customers. Furthermore, China Unicom is the lead AAE1 consortium member with China Mobile also selling capacity on the system. Avoiding carriers incorporated in China makes intercontinental capacity shopping is an excruciating exercise. I've been seeking Express AAE1 100G for almost a year for clients for whom China is a red line. Bandwidth sourcing has become a marathon. 😄 In light of this, I recommend buyers consider Peace despite the fact that it is a Chinese financed project. Encryption does work. It will not protect the IP overhead, which include the IP addresses, but the data payload itself will remain safe. Moreover, there are Peace providers such as PCCW or TELIN t...

This post summarizes many of the key concerns you must keep in mind when in purchasing 2africa capacity. Obviously, the more capacity a vendor has, the lower it can go on price.  In the major telecom hubs like South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, 2Africa providers typically have fibre to at least one carrier neutral data centre or the CLS itself is in a telecom hotel.  So the minefield of the opportunistic African cable landing station operator can be avoided. Indeed, in many of those countries the CLS itself is really just a cage or a room in a carrier neutral data center just like the Equiano CLS in the Open Access Data Centre in Lagos.  Buyers must be much more careful in the secondary markets. In some of those markets the 2Africa cable has no back haul to telecom hotels and the CLS is revamping itself or portraying itself as a carrier neutral site in accordance with the 2Africa consortium's open cable model. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating as the English sa...