If you run an ISP or a mobile network in Somalia, you are buying international capacity from somebody. That is not a weakness in your business — almost nobody in the world owns the whole path. What is worth knowing precisely is how many companies sit between your customers and the landing station, because every one of them is a margin you pay, a delay in your escalation, and a version of events you cannot independently check.

The chain, and what each link costs

A typical arrangement has three or four parties in it. The consortium or operator that holds capacity on the cable. The party that operates the landing station. Someone providing backhaul from the station to where your network starts. And frequently a reseller assembling those into a product.

Each link adds three things. A commercial margin, which you can see. A step in the escalation path, which you only see during an incident. And an information gap — because the reseller’s account of what happened is itself second-hand.

The margin is the least important of the three. Wholesale pricing in this market has come down considerably as landings have multiplied; the difference between buying direct and buying through one intermediary is real but rarely decisive. What is decisive is the second and third.

What “direct” actually buys you

Three things, none of which appear on a price list.

The restoration decision. When a fault occurs on equipment operated by your supplier, the decision about what gets restored first is made inside the company you have a contract with. When it occurs two parties away, your supplier is a customer of that decision, exactly as you are.

A verifiable diversity story. You can be shown which system carries your service and where the protection path physically diverges. If your supplier does not operate the station, they are relying on being told, and they may have been told something optimistic.

One escalation path. Landing station, backbone and teleport under one operations team means the person who picks up the phone can also look at the equipment. That is the entire difference between a status update and a fix.

What to buy, and in what order

Four products cover most requirements, and they are usually bought in this sequence.

IP transit. Internet transit on the provider’s own autonomous system, with direct peering rather than a chain of upstreams. The relevant question is whose AS your traffic rides and who makes the routing decisions.

International capacity. Protected or unprotected capacity on named submarine systems. Ask for the names — Somalia’s regulator publishes which systems land where and who operates each station, so the answer is checkable.

Backhaul. Getting what lands ashore to where your network actually begins. In a country where most of the route has to be built rather than leased, this is frequently the constraint rather than the international leg.

Colocation. Putting your own routers in the same building as the capacity you buy. This is the step that changes an ISP from a customer of a circuit into a participant in the meet-me room, with the option to cross-connect to other carriers directly.

Three questions before a wholesale contract

1. Whose autonomous system does my traffic ride, and who are the upstreams behind it? A provider with their own AS and direct peering has different failure modes from one reselling transit.
2. Which submarine system carries this, and who operates the station it lands at? Cross-check against the regulator’s register rather than the proposal.
3. In an incident, who makes the restoration decision, and are they on this contract? If not, ask how long the escalation takes to reach them.

The uncomfortable one

Ask any prospective supplier which of their capacity is held directly and which is reached through a partner or shareholding. Both are legitimate. A supplier who cannot separate the two for you has not thought about their own network carefully enough to be designing yours.

We publish our own answer because it is the reason to buy from us rather than around us: EASSy and 2Africa land at our own station in Mogadishu; WACS and EIG we reach through our shareholding in WIOCC. If you are building a diversity design, that distinction is not a detail — it is the design.