It was during Capacity Europe 2023 that I was first introduced to Carol Browne, director of infrastructure business development at Tampnet.
The first was during a subsea cable panel I was moderating, that featured heavy weights from the likes of Mobily, Infinera, Telxius, PCCW Global, Vodafone and Meta.
The second was a one-on-one deep dive where I got the opportunity to pick Browne’s brains on the latest Tampnet projects and plans. Straight out the gate, she reminds us of the company’s market position and unique offerings.
“Tampnet is at its core a subsea company,” she says. “We’re pure subsea because for the majority of the company, we don't really go that far on land because of the oil, gas and energy customers that we serve. In the carrier space we do, but it’s all based on unique diverse, subsea routes.”
This summer Tampnet started a project to lay a cable around the coast of Norway, called Norfest - The Nordic Festoon.
Spanning 700km in length, it has 10 landing points and delivers greater capacity, better redundancy and direct routes along the coast of Norway and into Sweden.
“In July, we started the project from the Green Mountain location in Stavanger, through to Kristiansand. We split the project into two parts for two reasons, but the biggest one was the weather,” explains Browne.
“The North Sea is a difficult place to have, install and operate infrastructure. With over 23 years of experience in doing these types of projects, we know If you don't get past Kristiansand before Autumn, you're not going to do it. Its one of those subsea anomalies where you can skip a month, but the impact is 12 months.”
As result, the first half of the project to Kristiansand was completed some time in August 2023, and at the time of our chat (October) had reloaded as was heading towards Oslo, due to complete sometime in mid-December. Making it less than 12 months in the making.
With Norfest as the primary focus for Tampnet this year, there have been announcements in Norway that have reinforced the company's decision to build this new subsea fibre route.
“The customers aren't necessarily driving this because we did this without a significant anchor customer. It was an assessment of the data centre environment, the hype cycle and what's the reality of that,” she says.
“But while we've been doing this project, Green Mountain have made announcements about new data centre locations, with one particularly significant announcement very recently. The infrastructure that we're installing in the subsea cable was designed to support this type of development, so it’s been great for us to know that our timing and our of assessment of the market was accurate.”
Alongside this, the carrier group at Tampnet has continued to add new points of presence (PoPs), extending and tweaking routes to improve latency and diversity or for reliability; all things that would be considered micro changes against the scale of the new Norfest system.
“Norfest will remove the challenges from the routes that we currently have, that we used terrestrial backhaul for. As Norway started getting busier, we found that we had more demands for diversity, more demands for reliability and more demands for latency. At the same time, you have shareholders with more demands for profitability. That was sort of the genesis of this idea.”
With a 200+ strong workforce the majority of Tampnet’s workforce supports the energy sector. The carrier group to which Browne belongs serve telcos on the traditional carrier side of things. But at a high-level the unique requirements of the company’s energy clients are reliability above all else.
“There are some customers for whom latency is the only important thing. Then we have other customers that say we need scale; we need pathways to growth and diversity. Everybody wants reliability, but the oil and gas customers, we have the responsibility to deliver 100% uptime to them,” she says.
On the services side of things, Tampnet is quite conventional in its offerings with things like traditional gigs, 100G, multiple 100G etc. it’s the routes that are quite unusual.
“We're selling things like 100G circuits between Stockholm and London or Oslo and London. What was unusual I think at the start, were the locations we were in, because that predates the Nordics really becoming a hub. It was kind of an alternate route to avoid FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris) markets and create diversity.”
Describing Tampnet products as “compatible with most other networks”, from a route point of view, she says “we are completely unique and from a customer approach we’re constantly adjusting because we don't own too much terrestrially. So, we can select specific segments to build routes that have that diversity that matches the unique part of our offering”.
She admits that there is a shift in the traditional carrier business towards spectrum discussions and dark fibre but at the same time, acknowledges that there's a lot of capacity business that is still to be done.
“I sort of describe my role in Tampnet as I deal with the customers that up until now buy services, but they really want infrastructure. So, it is those segments that really look like infrastructure, but in fact, it's delivered in multiple 100G. And some of those customers are really starting on their journey to migrate to fibre.”
Given the symbiotic relationship between subsea and data centres, Tampnet has never made its foray into the data centre business, but this is a common trend across the space, with Browne commenting that companies are usually either one or the other.
“Predominantly, the Digital Realty’s or the Equinix’s of the world stay out of subsea. It carrier-neutral and serves its purpose as is. Our customers are in data centres and that was a big factor in designing the Norfest route. We selected locations that have a data centre presence, or where we feel a data centre presence is going to come in the future or a cable landing station.”
On the growing prevalence of data centres over cable landing stations for subsea system landings, for Browne this comes down to the business case and the cost.
“While cable landing stations have gotten an awful lot cheaper over the years to build, it's still an additional cost,” she says.
“Part of what we did [for the Norfest project] was reuse locations that we already had or install containerised facilities, rather than the bigger cable landing stations, to the data centres.”
The most interesting part of Tampnet’s proposition is that unlike other companies that say to customers, you’ve reached the cable landing station, work your own way wherever else, that’s not their approach. Rather, their business case includes getting to wherever the nearest PoP is.
With such a strong presence in the Nordics, sustainability also plays a big part in the company’s business activities, driven in part by the types of customers it has.
“With the pedigree association with energy companies and their massive drive and investment towards environmental, social and governance (ESG), Tampnet has objectives and mandates, and we use those in all of our business operations,” explains Browne.
There were two key elements of the Norfest project that underpinned this ESG focus. The first was that the cable was manufactured in Norway. Describing with an analogy comparing it to food miles, Browne says, “you should eat the food that's closest to you”.
What she means is that by having at the cable built so close to the deployment site means you cut down the energy required to transport it to where it needs to be, before cable laying begins.
In addition, the Norwegian company chosen by Tampnet to install the cable [Nexans and Cecon] uses a laying methodology is very environmentally sensitive.
“As opposed to most projects that use a plough which digs up the seabed, it uses a less invasive way to lay the cable so there is not as much disruption to the seabed. These were two factors that helped us in our sort of vendor selection process,” she says.
On top of that, the system will be used as a sensor with one of the cables being handed over to a different team within Tampnet to monitor the seabed.
Specifically, the cable will use distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and state of polarisation (SoP) sensing technologies.
The first enables continuous, real-time measurements along the entire length of a fibre optic cable. The second detects changes in the lights state of polarisation at receiver end and is primarily used for undersea earthquake detection.
“Beyond this, we have a number of projects in consideration that sort of extend the reach of the network in the Nordics,” says Browne. "However, in parallel with our colleagues in the wider Tampnet organisation, there are other geographic regions that those customers go to.”
For example, the company already has a system in the Gulf of Mexico and may be looking at projects within that region as well by assessing what the carrier appetite is for a similar type of approach they’ve taken in other regions and then what it would look like for the carrier organisation to extend it.
