Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

As you know, the Rubymar dragged its anchor for 31 kilometers after its crew abandoned it last spring. In so doing it severed the AAE1, Seacom/TGN, and Eassy cables. After several months stalemate, the Houthi rebels gave the consortiums permission to repair them as long as it was done in a low key fashion. The fact that AAE1 lands in Yemen gave the Houthis political cover with their supporters. But the reality is that since then the Houthis have refused to agree to refrain from targeting cable ships laying new systems like 2Africa, Blue-Raman, and SWM6. This is why these projects are currently well behind schedule. There is no way to complete them in the near future as designed. Probably the only way forward right now would be build terrestrially along side the Red Sea through Saudi Arabia. In other words, bypass that part of the Red Sea adjacnet to Yemen. For example, Oman could hand off Blue-Raman traffic to Saudi Arabia which could take it across the desert and essentially bypass th...

Right now the industry's service performance is really bad. Much of the responsibility lies with the venture capital owners and senior management. In particular there is this prevalent dotcom era notion that fibre equals value. It does not. What generates value are well managed, high performance assets generating a lot of revenue with lean overhead and happy customers. As a result, we are seeing builds by carriers that should be focusing on achieving excellent customer service and network performance, including provisioning. ***One major European long provider is quoting three month delivery of terrestrial 100G waves. They are aggressively expand their network, but apparently their venture owners forgot that the market does not highly value empty networks. On-net circuit provisioning should take two weeks. In exceptional cases as little as one week. It is hard for me to see why provisioning should take longer.  ***Customer service in general is an abomination. If there were a telec...

Marseille was formerly a telecom backwater. It was a minor POP location. But then several things happened. The UK lost its super telecom hub status because it had become almost a single point of failure. Virtually every Atlantic cable linking the two continents landed in Cornwall, England. Secondly, Brexit meant that the UK was no longer part of Europe proper, but rather a political anomaly on its periphery. Thirdly, the Digital Titans recognized that most Asian-Europe traffic Asia was bound for the European continent. Latency could be sharply reduced by going up the Red Sea, across Egypt, and then traverse the Mediterranean to Southern European landings. Finally, traffic originating in Asia and destined for Europe was growing rapidly. So the bureaucrats of the Port Authority of Marseille built segregated landing facilities and sea lanes. Permit application process was streamlined so only one office was involved. Secure facilities were set up for power feeds. By the end of 2026, 16 cab...

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...

Landing late Monday in Lisbon. Departing Friday. Attending Atlantic Convergence at the Pátio da Galé in the City Centre.  Contact Details: Mobile 00-36-70-6055144. Work Email: roderick.beck@networksourcing.net. Also @roderickbeck on Telegram. And finally, via IM at https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderick-beck-94868948/.   Look forward to conversations and deal making.  Hot topics:  1. A half terabit of Equiano capacity available with LS1, OADC, and CT1 as the hand off data centres.  2. Inexpensive Lagos metro connectivity between OADC, MDXI, and Rack Centre.  3. Route Protected 100Gs CT1/JB2 at $8250 MRC. One year contract. 

Nigeria is one of Africa's key telecom hubs along with Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, and South Africa. Lagos has many important data centers including OADC where the Equiano cable landing station is located, MDXI Equinix, Rack Centre, and Medallion. And Lagos has no metro dark fibre. Hence your success in this market depends on good lit metro pricing and fast deployment.  An excellent metro provider is offering great deals on 100G wavelengths between Lagos' three most important telecom hotels: Rack Centre , OADC , and MDXI Equinix . Both volume and term discounts available. Delivery is two to three weeks. Equiano capacity can be bundled with the metro services. One stop shopping.  Service: EoDWDM. SLA: Unprotected. Topology: Ring. Site 1: Rack Centre. Site 2: OADC. Site 3: Equinix. Capacity: 3x 100G.  x-connect: Excluded. NRC: US$20,000. MRC: US$14,500 (1 Year). MRC: US$13,020 (2 Year). MRC: US$12,420 (3 Year). Interface: 100GE.