LET'S TALK
ABOUT
Then Versus Now
FEATURE
IT
BY KRISTIAN NIELSEN
A
So, I set to it: is there really a connection between the few months ago, I began an effort to identify factors factors leading up to the crash of the 2000s to the condileading up to and contributing to the crash our intions we see in the market today? dustry felt in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The idea For the purpose of this article, the time periods will be started with a statement a colleague made to me during our separated in to two distinct categories: Pre-Crash (1995annual Mai Tai Reception in Honolulu during PTC. We were catching up on the last few months, on the state of the 2001) and Current History (2010-2018). industry and where we thought things were headed. Our conversation, as most I’m sure do, steered towards THEN the extraordinary boom we’re experiencing at the moment. In the 1980s, optical submarine cable systems were We’re busy. We’re very busy. Installers are flat out; cable developed. The first transoceanic fiber optic system was the manufacturers are running at capacity and it feels like transatlantic, TAT-8, which was ready for service in 1988. there’s a new system announced every few weeks. Telecommunications with high quality and high capacity Physics demands that what goes up, must come down and there is no such tide table in the world that remains high indefinitely. There’s no way that this feverish level of building will continue forever, which prompted the comment that really got me thinking “Doesn’t this all feel familiar?” I inferred that my colleague had drawn a parallel between the build rate we see today to the boom that was seen in the Dot Com bubble of the 1990s. The unspoken fear being that the crash felt thereafter could be repeated in today’s market. Obviously concern about another down cycle is warranted, but will it be as devastating as it was 18 years ago? As a publisher and data hound, I always love these kinds of conversations; sometimes there’s no spreadsheet or dataset that can compete with someone’s intuition. Figure 1: Systems RFS by Year JULY 2019 | ISSUE 107
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