Int’l Bytes: Seaborn, Huawei, American Tower, Sunshine Coast

I’ll be on the road this week at MEF17. If you’re there, feel free to stop by and say hi. In the meantime, there’s a look at some international news from late last week and early this week:

Now that its Seabras-1 cable is online, Seaborn Networks is moving to put all the pieces in place to ramp revenues. Last week, they delivered SeaSpeed ULL routes to customers, offering ultra low latency connectivity between the exchanges at 1400 Federal in Carteret, NJ and B3 in Sao Paulo. They have two tiers differing by just 1.49ms: 105.05ms RTD and 106.54ms RTD. Spread Networks is their partner in taking those links to market.

Huawei has been granted an additional 5 months to finish a big project of theirs in the the African nation of Mali. They have been building a fiber network between Markala, Timbuktu, Mopti, Gao, Bamako, and Kouremale under a $62M contract. The original timetable was an aggressive 15 months, but the difficult terrain and security issues have gotten in the way – who would have thunk?

American Tower is making a $1.2B move in India. They are buying the Indian tower assets of both Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, a portfolio that spans some 20,000 towers generating $320M in revenue. The deal is expected to close in the first half o next year.

And in Australia, the worlds of subsea cables and politics are mixing more than usual. Apparently, someone has finally noticed that Australia is connected to the world mainly through Sydney, with relatively little physical diversity. The proposal is to land a new cable to the US and/or Asia from the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane. Just who would be building the cable and who would pay for it and all that are another matter.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · Low Latency · Towers · Undersea cables