FEATURE
SUBSEA CABLE DEMAND POST COVID 19 BY JOHN TIBBLES
F
orecasting demand for subsea cable capacity is never easy, so there won’t be any figures here just some thoughts. ‘Crises Create Change’ is hardly a new observation or comment but for most of us, in Europe at least, alive today we have not seen anything on the scale of the pandemic of 2020. The general view is that one had to live through WW2 to have any similar experience. Many allusions are made to ‘the war’ by politicians and media but they are generally spurious as there is no visible enemy and national boundaries are respected even less than in wartime. Europe in wartime was of course about one thing-staying alive. However, in the United States the war, still very much a crisis was fought somewhere else but its impact still profound. WW2 launched changes in the US economy that endured and fundamentally changed American economics. The incredible production capacity and capability shown by the United States from 1942 brought about the beginnings of the Interstate Highway network, the basis for a nationwide and transcontinental airline network and perhaps most relevant to this article the Bell System Long Distance Network. Each of which had a huge economic multiplier effect that propelled the US to become the world’s largest economy Thus, a crisis can bring good as well as bad but that depends to a degree where you are and when your timelines start. Let’s say our timeline starts in January 2020 – just before the annual global telecoms conference known as PTC. Appropriately for this topic it is held in Hawaii, almost exactly equidistant from Washington and Beijing.
THE SUBSEA CABLE WORLD IN JANUARY 2020
‘Our’ world, as it relates to the silent invisible digital highways under the oceans was a busy one. The entry of big data in to the subsea cable arena some years before
had been disruptive but it had brought very high levels of growth in capacity available. Some traditional players were pushed out of the market and others motivated to dig in and defend their position. Either way there were several major new cables and a lot of new even higher capacity cables were in the planning and development stage. One could almost say the industry was booming, except that this particular industry never really booms for everyone at the same time. System suppliers were still finding decent profit margins elusive and facing challenges to keep their owners and corporate masters happy even at a time when demand for their products was very strong. That product global digital optical capacity is being deployed on a bigger scale than ever before thanks to new design and new technology continually increasing the capacity of individual systems There was even a general public awareness that subsea cables really are one of the foundations of the internet and the cloud that the 21st century was coming to rely on in more and more ways. They were now featured in articles in the popular press and mass media being sponsored by icons of the digital age lead by Google and Facebook and not ‘so last century’ telcos. Not wholly true of course but true enough to finally make people in general realise that these systems were really important. However there were a few clouds on the horizon following on from the US governments increased political hostility to China that developed, via debates about 5G networks, to a flat refusal to allow subsea cables with seemingly any connection, financial or physical with China to interlink with US communication networks.
THE REAL WORLD - FEBRUARY 2020
While all this was going on media reports began to appear of a flu like virus appearing in central China. These reports, MAY 2020 | ISSUE 112
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