Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Firmus wanted to go public valued at $30 billion. How much actual data center capacity does it have booking revenue? 46 Megawatts. About the same power consumption as Vienna's Interxion 2 data center. Now Firmus has contracts for 912 megawatts. But there is no guarantee given supply side chain obstacles that it can meet its obligations. Nor do we know if these 'signed contracts' have any contractual teeth. A good guess is less teeth than grandma. Despite only modest-sized AI data center, Firmus has managed to incur $30 billion in debt and plan to issue more.  For full details, https://thetechcapital.com/firmus-shelves-ipo-valuation-concerns

This 24 fibre pair cable connects Mombasa, Kenya to Oman. It is a joint project of META and Safaricom (Kenya's largest mobile provider). Safaricom is the Mombasa landing partner, but META is the cable's sole owner. ASN is the construction partner. Capacity throughput should be a half petabit per second. Safaricom's participation reflects a long term trend for large mobile operators to enter the subsea cable business. Other examples including Vodafone, Bharti, Ooredoo, Axiata, and their subsidiaries. Subsea cable ownership allows mobile operators to expand operations overseas and also reduce the operating expenses for their international voice traffic. Oman is rapidly becoming a subsea cable hub as it offers an appealing alternative to the United Arab Emirates. The UAE's high cross connect CLS charges constitutes backward protectionism designed to shield its two telecommunication incumbents. Secondly, the UAE is simply too close to Iran to be a good place to land or repa...

Candle is one of the more interesting Intra-Asian cables to go live over the next several years. It is the first 24 fibre pair system to serve this region. Total transmission capacity is 570 Tbps. This makes it one of the highest capacity cables on the planet. Like Apricot, Candle avoids the South China Sea due to Beijing's territorial claims and permitting demands. The main trunk links the inseparable couple of Tokyo and Singapore with branches into the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Consortium leaders include META, Softbank, and Telekom Malaysia. This project, like Apricot, exemplifies the geopolitics of American-Chinese rivalry. Hyperscalers avoid China and HK and exchange traffic at neutral Singapore. However, the routing is shorter than Apricot because Candle is deployed at the edge of the South China Sea as opposed to a long detour around Indonesia and up the East Coast of the Philippines. Like Apricot, Candle offers physical diversity to the usual suspects mak...

When you come to Europe, you go to Amsterdam. It's inevitable. Amsterdam is one of Europe's two main Internet hub, the other being Frankfurt. Also the city is a major logistics hub that is a good hunting ground for commercial telecom deals. 1. AM5 is one of the best data centers for Internet peering, but has no power for new clients or upgrades for existing ones. Novation is your best bet.  2. AM3, Nikhef, and AMS17 do have power.  3. Nikhef is the best deal for smaller players because there are no recurring cross connects fees, power is available, and fractional racks have no install charges. Peering opportunities are excellent with both AMS-IX & NL-IX present. Excellent site for both private ISPs and financial trading firms.  4. NorthC's two Amsterdam facilities have plentiful space to lease. Not a lot of connectivity providers yet, but could prove highly attractive to the server intensive crowd which needs a lot of racks and power.  5. Relined is highly reco...

A lot of private equity money has been funneled into telecom infrastructure investments. My impression is that returns have been poor largely because the funds don't really understand the challenges in making wholesale operators successful. The key ingredient is not technology. That is available to all. Anyone who has the money can have Ciena's latest version of Wave Logic. It is the ability of management to run a nimble, lean operation that leads to success and very few high profile telecom managers understand that point. Sales cycles must be short and provisioning even shorter. Most managers chosen to run new projects come from staid, often incumbent telecommunication service providers that try to solve problems by throwing bodies at them. They are highly risk averse so they throw sand in the cogs by allowing lawyers to dictate the pace at which everything moves. I have seen customer NDAs with four pages devoted to data processing alone. And NDAs don't prevent customers f...

A Big European Network Wants Your Business.  Huge, dense footprint encompassing both data centers and commercial buildings.  Includes the most reliable subsea cable across the English Channel linking London and Amsterdam.  Fibre in the Chunnel as well.  Both 100G and 400G wavelengths available.  For those ready to 'ascend' to the next  level, spectrum is also available.  Metro dark fibre in key markets like London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris.  Fast Provisioning. Ranges from two to four weeks.   Latency optimized routes for both general Layer 1 consumers like ISPs and financial traders.  Full diversity possible between all city pairs.