Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

 African subsea cable leased capacity prices have bottomed around $18K to $22K MRC per 100G per month for Equiano and 2Africa. Examples include Lisbon to Lagos and Ghana to Lagos. Prices are not going lower. First of all, Google kept some Equiano capacity for itself and Facebook kept 4 of 2Africa's 16 pairs for itself. Moreover, 2Africa lands in over 25 countries. So average capacity per country excluding Facebook is approximately 6 Tbps. That figure would fall further if the Red Sea segment is ever completed. Finally, all consortium members for both cables are keeping some capacity for their own Internet backbones. Corroborating evidence that prices will remain stable is that consortium carriers are reluctant to sell wavelength or spectrum IRUs. Carriers sell IRUs for two reasons. The first is network asset portfolio rebalancing. If a carrier has plentiful capacity on cable X with relatively low pricing, it might sell an IRU to obtain capacity on cable Y that it can ...