Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Everyone at the conference wants to be Keppel. The carrier bought five fibre pairs on the 12 fibre pair Bifrost subsea network at construction cost and then sold them individually for a total of $1.2 billion dollars. This is a classic example of bandwidth arbitrage that has investors outside the industry salivating and has many Pacific wholesale carriers hoping to do the same thing in the future. Why do the heavy lifting of providing lit services when you can buy fibre pairs at construction cost and then flip them? What made Keppel so successful is that Bifrost was the first cable to directly link Asia's premier telecom hub, Singapore, to the US. And the fact that the hyperscalers kept the rest of the capacity for themselves. So Keppel ended up as the monopoly supplier of capacity to the entire wholesale market. So the moral is be the sole carrier partner on a sexy hyperscaler project and watch customers coming running to you with the enthusiasm of teenage girls at a Beatles concer...