FEATURE
MUSINGS ON ATLANTIC SYSTEMS BY WAYNE NIELSEN
I
had the opportunity to present my thoughts on the Atlantic market in the recent submarine session at PTC ’23 in Honolulu in January. There’s only so much one can squeeze into a dozen minutes, so I decided to present the full version in SubTel Forum. As such, I considered three main areas of interest, namely System Growth, Capacity, and Arctic Snapshot, detailed herein.
SYSTEM GROWTH
Growth on the Transatlantic route skyrocketed from the late 1990s through 2003. After a 12year drought, the Transatlantic region added a new cable every year from 2015 to 2018. After a brief respite in 2019, the Transatlantic region is back to pushing forward with strong momentum. Two major causes of the development slowdown after 2003
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were a glut of capacity and the financial crash of the early 2000s which was brought on by overinvestment in the submarine cable industry. With investment on the rise again, and systems aging out in the Transatlantic route,