Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The private credit company P Capital Partners has ousted this ambitious project's founders and seized control. It appears P Capital extended a loan to finance Eastern Light back in 2021. As is standard, the debt covenants probably included the right to oust management and become the company's owner if certain conditions were not met. The new owners specialize in offering high interest rate, loans so that companies can avoid equity dilution. According to the company's press release, prior management was unable to meet the key requirement of new equity financing. Hence they were fired. It is important to understand how these greenfield projects work. Generally, founders invest money in the project as equity. Since these projects are unlikely to generate cash flow for many years, equity is the appropriate financing. The project is high risk and can only be justified if there are high returns.  Banks and other credit providers generally finance projects that already are genera

Google has been a path breaker in the submarine cable world. It financed the first spatial division multiplexing cable across the Atlantic, namely the 12 fibre pair Dunant system . It is also the owner of the new 16 pair  Topaz system which directly links Canada to Asia and bypasses the US. Not to mention the billion dollars Google is spending to crisscross the Pacific with a web of new cables connecting Japan, Guam, Hawaii, Chile, Australia, Fiji, French Polynesia, and other island chains. Umoja is no less surprising than its predecessors. It has two key components. A new terrestrial fibre highway in partnership with Liquid Technologies that will head Northwest from Kenya's data centres to Uganda and then South to traverse and connect Rwanda, the Democratic Congo Republic, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and finally, South Africa.  The bane of sub-Saharan Africa has been the lack of domestic long haul fibre connecting the landlocked countries to each other and to the coasts where the subsea