Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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...

I am seeing a growing number of requests for subsea capacity linking Thailand to Singapore. Thailand is challenging for many reasons. Many consortium members own no fibre beyond the Thai cable landing stations. This leaves them hostage to the country's two main cable landing station operators, TOT and NT, state owned telecom operators, that have exploited their CLS control to charge high backhaul pricing to the carrier neutral data centers.  The country has three key cable landing stations. Sri Racha, just outside Bangkok, hosts ADC, AAG, and some older cables. In the far South, near Thailand's Malaysian border, a large number of cables land at the Songkhla and Satun cable landing stations. Among the more important high capacity modern cables, AAE1, IAX, and MIST land at Satun. SJC2, AAE1, MVISTA, APG, SEA-H2X, and TIS use the Songkhla CLS. As you can readily infer from the map, backhaul pricing from the South to Bangkok is quite high due to the distance and terrain. The terrai...

Tiktok is investing $25 billion in a Thai data center. They recently purchased over 4 terabits of Layer 1 capacity into Bangkok causing prices to skyrocket. I have located some spare capacity at the 10G and 100G level.   Appetizer ...  A point: Songkhla Cable Landing Station. Z point: SG1, Singapore.  Two diversely routed 10G waves.  Term: 3 years.  MRC per wave: $8.5K.

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...