Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The consortium has been coy regarding its plan to bypass the Red Sea. My initial guess was that SMW6's main trunk would land in Oman and head across the Saudi Arabian desert to Egypt. I know more now. The main trunk will land in Bahrain and Kuwait and then go overland to Jeddah. If you view the map, you can see there is a highway making an almost straight line from Bahrain via Riyadh to Jeddah. This approach makes sense because it uses an existing right of way and hence sharply reduces deployment costs. I don't know whether existing terrestrial SA fibre was used or new stuff blown through an empty conduit. Any Saudi terrestrial capacity will be very expensive although pricing may have been tempered by the desire to get the consortium to adopt the route as part of the main trunk. It will be interesting to see if Blue-Raman, Africa-1, 2Africa, and other stalled projects follow a similar path. Such an outcome would be upsetting for many Middle Eastern in the vicinity of the Red Se...

- 2Africa is much more expensive than Equiano. The 2Africa 100G pricing is $25K and above excluding tails for Lisbon to Lagos. In contrast, Equiano 100G pricing is below $20K now. Similarly, Equiano 10G pricing gravitates around $5K versus $10K on the same route for 2Africa.  The reason for this disparity is that the 144 Tbps Equiano cable primarily serves South Africa, Portugal, and Nigeria. In contrast, the 180 Tbps 2Africa network serves over 30 countries and Facebook kept 4 of the 16 pairs for itself. Note that the 2Africa map does not include the Pearls extension of 2Africa to the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, and Mumbai.  Another sign of the impending capacity crunch is the unwillingness of 2Africa consortium members to sell IRUs. An IRU is a long term capacity sale ranging typically dffrom 10 years to life of system. Carriers will not sell IRUs if they expect future capacity shortages or think they are likely. Many of these carriers have transit backbones that they must keep ...

As you know, the Rubymar dragged its anchor for 31 kilometers after its crew abandoned it last spring. In so doing it severed the AAE1, Seacom/TGN, and Eassy cables. After several months stalemate, the Houthi rebels gave the consortiums permission to repair them as long as it was done in a low key fashion. The fact that AAE1 lands in Yemen gave the Houthis political cover with their supporters. But the reality is that since then the Houthis have refused to agree to refrain from targeting cable ships laying new systems like 2Africa, Blue-Raman, and SWM6. This is why these projects are currently well behind schedule. There is no way to complete them in the near future as designed. Probably the only way forward right now would be build terrestrially along side the Red Sea through Saudi Arabia. In other words, bypass that part of the Red Sea adjacnet to Yemen. For example, Oman could hand off Blue-Raman traffic to Saudi Arabia which could take it across the desert and essentially bypass th...

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 Sing...