Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Peace Cable Layer 1 100G floor pricing is approximately $17K per month on 1 year contracts for Chinese carriers. There is a $4K MRC premium for non-Chinese carrier capacity using Western network gear like Ciena or Nokia.  SMW5 MRCs range from upper 20Ks to mid-30K range. Mostly sold out; real offers extremely rare. AAE1 MRCs for the standard latency route range from $26K to lower $30Ks. 

Layer 1 bandwidth is increasingly tight in the Pacific Triangle consisting of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In particular, many carriers' spare ADC capacity is completely gone. Whole fibre pairs are exhausted. Most older cables like SJC are maxed out. Even SJC2 is mostly gone. A large number of resellers is compounding the bandwidth misery by demanding 100G pricing in the $9K to $12K range. This is absurd and not happening. I know of 3x ADC 100G waves available on the Tokyo/Singapore route. One year contracts only. Non-Chinese carrier and equipment. Demarcation points are SG1 and Maruyama CLS. MRC is an inexpensive $13.7K. Don't be a fool and shop this price because this is the network operator's offer, not a resale by me. I don't resale. I take you to the Source (like the Machine Main Frame in the Matrix film series). There is one SJC2 100G wave available for contract early February. SG3/CC1. Available on a 3 year contract at $13.5K MRC plus a $10K install. One SJC...

Good outage and repair history. Diverse to any subsea cable routes. Enjoys comparable latency to subsea routes. Good standalone solution because repairs have averaged under 15 hours. 

The 16 fibre pair MVISTA project has the potential to disrupt the cozy world of Southeast Asian telecommunications. The majority shareholder is the Stavian Group, a Vietnamese industrial conglomerate building one of the first carrier neutral data centers in Vietnam. Stavian is a good example of how cash heavy and well established companies are entering the Southeast Asian service provider market in search of their slice of the Good Life. Another example is Keppel, which began life as a builder of offshore rigs after WW2 and today is a very successful asset manager of real estate, infrastructure (power), and connectivity. Companies outside telecommunications are drawn to subsea cables due to the robust connectivity demand in Southeast Asia. This reflects the region's fast growth, but also a fragmented geography. Many countries are islands like Indonesia, New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore or peninsulas like Thailand and Malaysia. The easiest way to build cost effective communication...

Singapore currently has 26 operating fiber optic cables. The government is aiming to double that figure over the next ten years. It is also wants to increase residential broadband to 10G, which seems frankly far fetched and perhaps overkill. The biggest drawbacks to landing in Singapore is the limited number of cable landing stations and the congested sea harbor. I would tell the government that it needs more cable landing stations and that they must be physically diverse to the existing facilities. More Malaysian/Singapore terrestrial crossings for Trans-Continental cables, but that conflicts with the sovereignty angle dominating policy making today. https://www.edb.gov.sg/en/news-and-insights/singapore-to-double-capacity-for-subsea-cable-landings-to-enhance-digital-connectivity

1. All terrestrial route with good outage history and longest outage only 17 hours. Find a subsea cable with a record that good. 2. Three year MRC: $26.5K MRC.

Although most subsea cables with Singapore POPs land at Singapore, some do not, and these exceptions are the keys to better uptime for your Layer 1 network. Five fibre pair AAE1 lands at a Penang, Malaysia CLS that has a fully diverse fibre ring for automatic route protection into Singapore. Each side of the fibre ring uses a separate bridge to cross the Malaysian/Singapore border. One side of the ring terminates at the older of the two Global Switch data centers and the other at SG3. So AAE1 neither lands at Singapore nor uses any of the Singapore cable landing stations. This is one reason why AAE1 is a 'must' for network capacity buyers. Other reasons include low latency for the Marseille/Singapore end points and relatively good pricing due to the system's high capacity. Bay of Bengal Gateway also lands in Penang, Malaysia, but my understanding is that it and AAE1 use different cable landing stations. However, I have not seen backhaul maps so I cannot clai...

Building a resilient Layer 1 network where Singapore is a major POP is very difficult. Most subsea cables land in Singapore via designated sea lanes with four to five cables per lane. This increases the risk of a dragged anchor taking many cables. Although over the last ten years there have been few or none such incidents, a network planner is judged on future performance and proper risk management. Moreover, most subsea cables land at subsea cable landing stations (only 4 in total) serving many other cables. So dividing traffic among several cables is not good enough if resiliency is the goal. Tuas CLS: Apricot, Asia Direct Cable, Bifrost, I-2SEA, I2I, IAX, Indigo West, INSICA, MIST, MVISTA, PEACE, SEA-H2X, SMW4, SMW5, SMW6, SJC, & UMO. Tanna Merah: SEAX-1, BJC2, BJC3, & ASC. Changi North: AAG, BSCS, CANDLE, C2C, Echo, JAKABARE, MIC-1, RISING 8, TGN-IA, TGN-INDICOM, & TIS. Changi South: APG, ASE, C2C, MATRIX, & SJC2. Cable landing diversity is extremely hard to achieve...

MRC: $32.5K. A point: Most Mumbai DCs. Z point: SG3.  Cable: IAX.

A consortium consisting of TATA Communications, Lightstorm, Microsoft, and Singtel just announced a new 16 fibre pair subsea network tailored to serve the AI data center markets in Hyderabad, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. It includes two Indian landings, one in Southern Chennai and another at Machilipatnum, the latter being the shortest path to Hyderabad. Both Hyderabad and Lumpur host large numbers of data centers equipped with GPUs for rent to estimate AI large language models. Conversely, Singapore is a distribution point for estimated AI models. What is sometimes called AI inference. Both space and power in the city state are too limited and expensive for AI model estimation. Besides the Singapore and Indian landings, there will likely be a cable branch landing in the Malaysian province of Selangor, chosen because it is the shortest way to reach Kuala Lumpur. Public information on the new system is sparse, but it is also likely that cable will include be extended to Hyderabad and Ch...

A point: SG1. Z point: FR5. Term: 3 Years. Routing: Avoids Marseille and clocks 139 ms RTD. 

Google announced today a $15 billion dollar infrastructure investment in India that includes a new cable landing station in Visakhapatnam (Vizag), a Mumbai to Perth subsea link, a cable connecting Vizag to Singapore via a Malaysian landing (like Bay of Bengal Gateway), a subsea network between Chennai and Vizag, and a major cable from Vizag to Capetown. Although hyperscalers are frequent targets of criticism, one cannot say they lack ambition. 😀 Google's connectivity investments aim to create seamless, high capacity cables connecting India to the US using new and physically diverse routes. 1. First cable from India's West Coast to Australia. 2. First Indian  cable to South Africa. 3. Creation of a third Indian subsea hub in Vizag to improve cable landing diversity. 4. A cable link between India's two East Coast subsea and telecom hubs. 5. India's second cable to reach Singapore via Malaysian overland routes. Remarks: 1. I think Sify is like to be the cable landing oper...

A point: Most Mumbai carrier neutral data centres. Z point: SG5, Singapore. Term: 3 Years. MRC: $38K. NRC: $20K. Customer responsible for cross connects.

The private equity firm Cerberus has taken a majority equity stake in Datawave Networks, a Cyprus-based subsea cable developer. Datawave's key project is to deploy a linear 16 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable linking UAE, Oman, Mumbai, Chennai, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Datawave began this project in 2019 when the company was incorporated. But due to the increasing dominance of American Tech Giants, investors have been reluctant to fund private wholesale network operators. It is simply seen as too risky given lack of hyperscaler demand for leased subsea network capacity. Due to the Cerberus acquisition, SING is now fully funded with Subcom expected to complete the project in 2030. I believe part of what drove Cerberus' interest in this project was the Red Sea bottleneck. While building Marseille to Singapore would be viewed as too risky given the required capital, linking the new subsea cable hub of Oman to Singapore seems like a...

The Pacific and Southeast Asia have two major telecom hubs: Tokyo and Singapore. Tokyo's status reflects its importance as the capital of one of Asia's largest economies with huge trade and financial flows with the United States as well as a defense treaty. Tokyo dominates Japan like Paris does France. Singapore's emergence reflects Hong Kong's downfall due to the Chinese government's failure to honor its commitment to HK autonomy. China requires any political candidate for HK office to be approved by it. Hence every HK politician is de facto a Beijing puppet. Secondly, China's security laws allow the arrest of anyone criticizing the Chinese government. The collapse of HK's rule of law is illustrated by numerous arrests of anyone peacefully opposing the government. You can go to jail for wearing a T-shirt advocating HK independence. In contrast, Singapore is neutral in the geopolitical war between the US and China and its judges are independen...

The American tech giant is deploying a high capacity cable directly linking Thailand to Christmas Island, which in turn will be connected by two diverse cables to Australia. The new route is unusual as it goes around Indonesia to reach Thailand's slender West Coast leg as opposed to threading the Sundra Stait and traversing the very busy waters off Singapore and up the Bay of Thailand. I told an international development bank a few weeks ago that it would make sense to do such a landing in order to avoid the crowded and congested Thailand Bay. My idea was to link India's East Coast to Thailand via its slender Southern leg. It is always a good idea to avoid routes that are already heavily used by subsea cables to improve resiliency. In this case, it also avoids ship-infested waters that pose a high risk of subsea cable damage. This new project makes two things very clear. Google's subsea cable guys are looking to reduce their network's reliance on Singapore, which is th...

1. ASE; 100G Wave; Tokyo/Singapore; $19K MRC; 2 Years. 2. AAE1; 10G Wave; Marseille/Singapore; $3,500 MRC; 3 Years. 3. Juno; 100G Wave; Tokyo/LA; $16,461 MRC; 3 Years. 4. ADC; 100G Wave; HK/Singapore; $12.3K MRC; 3 Years. 5. Faster; 100G Wave; TY2/Coresite LA; $18.2k MRC; 3 Years.

 ***100G; SMW5; Marseille/Singapore; $32.5K; 3 Year Term. ***100G; AAE1; Marseille/Singapore; $28.5K; 3 Year Term. Take It Or Leave It Offers. Don't even think of trying to negotiate. It's not that kind of market and you know it. 🙂

Top 10 ASN Ranking! Not Cogent. Not Hurricane.

AAE1 is the lowest latency path for the all-important Marseille to Singapore route. Also the lowest latency for Frankfurt via Bari, Italy to Singapore. Buy now to avoid your boss beating you with a big stick! 😃