Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Turkey has bee a very tough market for global ISPs. Until EXA lit terrestrial fibre a few years ago across the Bulgaria's border with Turkey, 100G pricing was $15K per month and above. EXA now dominates the key Frankfurt to Istanbul route with lower pricing. But the situation is not ideal. Physical diversity is an illusion across the narrow border with one conduit system carrying much of the international traffic. Sparkle's old Mednautilus system does provide an alternative to the land routes, but it's primacy has been too high for foreign ISPs in Turkey to flourish. Sparkle has signed a memorandum of understanding with Turkcell to build a subsea cable that will land in the Instanbul suburd of Izmir and at Chania, Greece. The yet unnamed cable will interconnect at Chania, a Greek island, to the BlueMed cable which will carry the traffic to Marseille, Milano, and other key telecom hubs. We have few details on the cable itself other than a target design throughp...

Retelit and its minority partner the Italian government just made a $700 million Euro bid for Sparkle's subsea cable business. The bid expires January 27th, 2025. More details here . My first impression is that this is not a rousing endorsement of the subsea cable service industry. Sparkle does a billion Euros in annual revenue according to a publicly available corporate presentation with wet assets including initially full ownership of the Mediterranean Blue cable and some ownership on Blue-Raman, Equiano, Seabras1, and Curie. However, voice comprises a significant portion of its revenue which most investors will penalize in their valuation estimates. In general, the financial markets view voice as less valuable than data traffic because it is considered a low growth, low margin business. Data is sexy. Voice is not.  I have always viewed Sparkle as a stodgy company with a 20th century management style with too well dressed senior managers. Rigid old hierarchical corporate structur...