Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Right now EUNetworks is clearly the best carrier for Layer 1 Western European network capacity. I work on a daily basis with them. The carrier offers the best combination of performance, price, and commercial flexibility. They are my default go-to provider. Note they offer wavelengths, spectrum, and metro dark fibre among other services. For ISPs they offer lower latency general bandwidth routes than their competitors. This is a big deal for African and Asian ISPs who already endure high latency to the distances between Europe and these other continents. Their new Digital Super Highways are quite attractive. These massive upgrades of the standard Western Europe routes give them a distinct edge over the 2000 era networks of their competitors. Arelion is the best transit provider, but Hurricane Electric should be a part of the upstream mix as well. RETN also has good transit. All three are in the top 15 ASN ranking which is a measure of the number of BGP links to other ISPs. These ...

The beauty of publicly traded telecom infrastructure companies is that they cannot shroud their business in secrecy. Below is a very high level breakdown of Equinix revenues over the last several years. In 2023 the company got $1.9 billion from interconnection, which is its euphemism for cross connects. It comprised 19.4% of 2023 revenues. I must confess I am bit puzzled by how slowly the cross connect revenues are growing because Equinix offers no volume discounts (in Europe even big long haul carriers get only a few Euros off) to anybody. Moreover, Equinix is indispensable in many cities like Zurich, London (Slough, UK), and Amsterdam (AM5 is the best single peering point in the city). A 3Q2024 investor presentation says the company has 478,000 total interconnections. Let's assume each is a cross connect. That implies $3,974 USD per year or $331 per month, which seems too low. I invite readers to comment if they have an idea of what explains the discrepancy between the standard $...