Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Colt has bought capacity on Vodafone's Apollo South cable, one of the first Trans-Atlantic cables to directly connect France to the United States (along with Flag Atlantic 1). Apollo was RFS 2003. I was surprised Colt would buy capacity on a 8 terabit cable that has already 22 years of service under its belt. Apollo is a low capacity system facing similar operating expenses to higher capacity systems, hence its pricing should be generally much higher. In general, Colt appears to be mostly interested in serving the low latency end of the financial markets, mostly market markers (providing a bid and ask for a financial asset) and financial traders. Hence the most plausible explanation is that Apollo South provides a low latency route connecting Paris and Frankfurt to the NYSE and NASDAQ data centers in New Jersey as well as the other financial markets like BATS located at NY4, Secaucus Equinix. Another possible angle might be that the cable is not only low latency, but also highly di...

 1. APG Cable; 100G; Hong Kong/Singapore; $8500 MRC; 1 Year. 2. ADC; 100G; Tokyo/Singapore; $13,850 MRC; 1 Year. 3. ASE; 100G; Tokyo/Singapore; $18,000 MRC; 1 Year. 4. ASE; 100G; HK/Tokyo; $8,500 MRC; 1 Year. 5. ASE; 100G; HK/Singapore; $5500 MRC; 1 Year Remarks: Customers responsible for cross connects. Pricing is the same whether from CLS to CLS or carrier neutral POP to carrier neutral POP.

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...