Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

I am seeing a growing number of requests for subsea capacity linking Thailand to Singapore. Thailand is challenging for many reasons. Many consortium members own no fibre beyond the Thai cable landing stations. This leaves them hostage to the country's two main cable landing station operators, TOT and NT, state owned telecom operators, that have exploited their CLS control to charge high backhaul pricing to the carrier neutral data centers.  The country has three key cable landing stations. Sri Racha, just outside Bangkok, hosts ADC, AAG, and some older cables. In the far South, near Thailand's Malaysian border, a large number of cables land at the Songkhla and Satun cable landing stations. Among the more important high capacity modern cables, AAE1, IAX, and MIST land at Satun. SJC2, AAE1, MVISTA, APG, SEA-H2X, and TIS use the Songkhla CLS. As you can readily infer from the map, backhaul pricing from the South to Bangkok is quite high due to the distance and terrain. The terrai...

Hi Everyone,  I am available to help you acquire Layer 1-3 network capacity based on your requirements. In general I don't charge procurement fees because the carriers will pay me for any subsequent sales. So if you work with me and you buy, then you will contract directly with the network operator. This ensures you get the best possible price. My value-added is my knowledge of the operators, market pricing, delivery performance, latency, uptime, commercial flexibility, strengths, weaknesses, and the like. I am also good at negotiating deal terms on your behalf.  In a few cases I take a retainer because the client is looking for long term consulting.  You can reach me at roderick.beck@networksourcing.net. I live part of the year in Europe and also in Africa. 

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...

Singapore currently has 26 operating fiber optic cables. The government is aiming to double that figure over the next ten years. It is also wants to increase residential broadband to 10G, which seems frankly far fetched and perhaps overkill. The biggest drawbacks to landing in Singapore is the limited number of cable landing stations and the congested sea harbor. I would tell the government that it needs more cable landing stations and that they must be physically diverse to the existing facilities. More Malaysian/Singapore terrestrial crossings for Trans-Continental cables, but that conflicts with the sovereignty angle dominating policy making today. https://www.edb.gov.sg/en/news-and-insights/singapore-to-double-capacity-for-subsea-cable-landings-to-enhance-digital-connectivity

Subco announced recently four new 24 fibre pair cables connecting Australia to Japan, Singapore, Guam, and the Continental US. This is obviously a multi-billion dollar undertaking. Now Subco owns the Oman-Australia and SMAP cables. It is also a consortium member on Indigo West and Indigo Central. So I believe Subco has significant retained earnings. Nonetheless, these new cables together probably come close to the $2 billion construction dollar mark. Moreover, hyperscalers don't buy capacity prior to successful execution. Indications of interest, yes, but not contractual commitments. LOIs are soft commitments. So this is a daring undertaking by one of the most successful private operators on subsea cables. For those new to the industry, a private operator generally is a wholesale player that owns an entire cable as opposed to a consortium member or a hyperscaler. However, the historical track record for private operators has not been great. So far Subco has an exception. By 2001, p...

Looks very similar in design to our present fibre optic subsea cable networks. For example, the Red Sea is a telegraph cable highway and Singapore is a telegraph cable hub. However, the Persian Gulf is not important because hydrocarbons won't be discovered there for another 30 years. Note the cable connecting South Africa to Australia, which is reminiscent of Google's Umoja cable. Note the cables connecting Argentina and Brazil to Senegal and South Africa, but Nigeria, a major hub today, has no connectivity.

I came across several instances of dubious subsea cable business models at the conference. 1. For example, one subsea cable startup thinks it can skip equity investments and actually finance its project via debt in the form of bonds. This idea makes absolutely zero sense to anyone with a finance background or experience in the field. The problem with debt is that you must make payments even through your revenues will be zero for several years while the project is executed. Furthermore, it is total crap to claim you will sell capacity IRUs prior to RFS. The simple fact is that sales prior to substantially finishing the project never happen. In the six months prior to RFS sales can happen because carriers can see the project is almost ready. Indeed, that is when the hyperscalers sell capacity. But a debt-financed project needs big IRU deals from the day that bonds are issued. Financial history is quite clear on this point. Telecom infrastructure projects in their early stages are almost ...

This is the Peace cable's Marseille backhaul. It illustrates standard landing architecture as well as good network design. First of all, the cable comes ashore outside Marseille Port's own cable landing facilities for the sake of physical diversity and resilience. Always put some distance between a cable and others if possible. This increases the cable's value and demand for its capacity because diversity means adding it to the network portfolio improves its resilience. It is analogous to the role of diversification in a financail portfolio. Like all other subsea cables, Peace terminates in a beach manhole where it was spliced to a terrestrial fibre cable that also contains a power conductor just like the subsea cable. Then the terrestrial fiber goes to an Orange 'CLS', really just a power feed hut. From there the cable becomes part of a fully diverse fibre ring that includes dual entrances into MRS2 where most of the cable's SLTEs are kept. Most likely this fib...

Route Latency SG/Marseille 136 ms Mombasa/Marseille 104 ms Karachi/Marseille 92 ms Karachi/Signapore 82 ms Kenya/Singapore 93 ms.

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...

My understanding is that standard practice is to slice a damaged cable in two prior to retrieval. Hard to lift a 14,530 kilometer cable otherwise. 😃

 National security analysts please note, there is no sabotage category because there are no credible cases of sabotage. The IPCC study estimates 3,224 subsea fibre optic cable repairs over the last 18 years. It classifies 84% of outages as caused by fishing and anchors, 5% due to abrasion, 4% due to plant failure (subsea optical amplifiers or PFEs), and 7% due to geological disturbances such as turbidity currents induced by earthquakes or heavy rains or debris slides in subterranean caverns. Abrasion often leads to shunt faults where water reaches the power conductor.

***Next year we should get 2Africa finally connected to Marseille. But the cost and hence pricing of those links will be relatively high because the consortium must pay and operate terrestrial bypass from either Djibouti or Mombasa to the Sudan 2Africa CLS. Market pricing will decline from current levels, but probably not as much as the majority expects. ***Many of you are over shopping. For example, 2Africa market pricing between JB and Mombasa ranges from upper twenties to lower 40s. Real negotiation is give and take. Not just ask. You want lower price, then prepare to offer long terms or enlarge the deal. You will fail in procurement if your standard opening line is 'give me the lower price possible'. ***When you get a great offer, take it. The East Coast is a tight market. Don't take that offer back to other carriers and try to beat them down. It's annoying and alienates vendors. It is also amateurish. Your focus should be long term relationships, not short term opp...

Hi Everyone, I will be in Singapore next week and am available to meet. You can reach me at roderick.beck@networksourcing.net .

Term: 2 Years. 2Africa Djibouti CLS cross connects are $125 per month and 100G backhaul to Djibouti Data Center is $1100 per month. 

A point: Most carrier neutral Mumbai data centers. Z point: SG1, Singapore. Term: 1 Year. NRC: $10K.

1. Hyperscalers are worried that a capacity shortage will materialize two or three years down the road due to robust traffic growth and the absence of any major subsea cable project in the pipeline. Their network investment teams are studying the issue. 2. 2Africa is bypassing the Red Sea by building Northeast African routes that will connect either Mombasa to the Sudan 2Africa CLS in the Red Sea or a route from Djibouti to the same CLS. Decision has not yet been made. 3. 2Africa from Mombasa to Marseille should be live next summer. This will bring relief to carriers and ISPs alike. 4. Africa-1 project is struggling and may be out of funds. 5. Mombasa is the subsea cable hub, but Nairobi is the data center for Kenya. 6. Excess capacity on Equiano and 2Africa exists and ISPs should stock up before the Telecom Winter arrives.

EIG upgrade has been delayed until 2028. Three year MRC: Under $40K for right customer. Life of system I00G wave IRU ~ $1 million. 

EXA unveiled its first home grown long haul subsea cable project today. Meridian is a 24 fibre pair cable that should reach or exceed the half petabit per second transmission milestone. It will land in New Jersey, and at Brean, UK, where EXA's low latency Express cable (a Hibernia Atlantic project that was RFS in 2015) lands. I believe EXA will deploy a prefabricated, modular cable landing station in New Jersey to ensure the physical diversity that hyperscaler clients desire. Another possibility is the NJFX facility. The term 'Meridian' can refer to the Meridian line that goes through Greenwich, UK and connects the North and South poles. The term also means 'the peak of success or excellence'.  This cable project is a gutsy move. There have no pure carrier projects connecting North America to Europe since the Express cable went live. From 2016 to the present all Atlantic cables have been hyperscaler owned and designed. So EXA is counting on hyperscalers to take fibr...

Apparently the Saudi Arabian regulator is refusing to allow local carriers to sell dark fiber to the subsea cable consortiums that desire to bypass the Red Sea. This is a big blow. Buying lit Layer 1 transport across Saudi Arabia is an economic no go for intercontinental cables. I guess I should not be surprised given Saudi women are still under the guardianship of their nearest male relatives, but it is still disappointing. 😡 Middle Eastern governments love to project themselves as progressive forces, but they often fail to implement decisive reforms. Old ways die hard.  Several reliable sources tell me that the 2Africa consortium is considering terrestrial Northeast routes to the 2Africa Sudan CLS. There are other routing options as well. Houthi occupation of key Red Sea islands this past week simply reinforces the need to bypass the Red Sea. Get it done, gentlemen.