Carriers Put a Number on Subsea Demand, and It Is 200,000 Kilometres

A group of carriers has produced the first aggregated forecast of its own subsea cable demand, and the number it settled on is more than 200,000 kilometres of future cable. The Global Leaders Forum published the figure after a twelve-month exercise in which participating operators submitted forward-looking project plans that the forum then anonymised and consolidated before showing them to cable suppliers.

The motivation is supply. Subsea manufacturing and installation capacity is finite, and carriers argue that without a clear view of demand, that capacity goes to whichever buyers move first.

TeleGeography’s transport networks research puts the scale of the build in context: new submarine cable construction has cost an average of more than $2 billion a year over the past nine years, and cables worth more than $16 billion are scheduled to enter service between 2026 and 2029.

Earlier industry sessions in Asia described how stretched the supply chain already is. Panellists at ITW Asia in January put delivery timelines at up to six years, with manufacturing backlogs of about 150,000 kilometres and roughly 100 new cable systems competing for the same slots.

Enrico Bagnasco, who chairs the forum and runs Sparkle, the international arm of Telecom Italia, said no single organisation can solve the delivery challenge alone. Sparkle has two cables in progress: Barracuda, which will land at its Genoa platform under a €100 million deal due to start operations in 2028, and GreenMed, built with Alcatel Submarine Networks and Elettra, with first sections due in service late the same year. The forum plans to keep collecting carrier forecasts and sharing them with vendors on a regular cycle.