CABLESHIPS
CAPACITY
CONNECTION
EDITION SIX: DYNAMICS OF THE SUBMARINE CABLE BANDWIDTH MARKET Where Are We and Where Are We Going? BY JOHN MAGUIRE INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
Welcome to Edition Six of Capacity Connections. While we’ve been focussing in previous editions on specific issues affecting our market—all the while trying to keep our discussion in context—I thought it might be worthwhile as the year draws to a close to increase our altitude and have a more holistic look at our current situation and where we might possibly be headed over the next few years. Submarine cables are not just the “critical infrastructure in global communications” that we hear and read of with apparently increasing regularity in global mass media, each one is a complex, multi-year infrastructure project. And each one takes a sometimes subtly— sometimes not so subtly—different set of inputs and delivers something unique into the market for subsea bandwidth. Evolution is the only constant. The market: buyers and sellers collectively, along those who design, build and maintain the submarine systems, and the environment in which they all operate, is, as we have seen, undergoing change in every category. This has always been the case—but never previously has it wrought such significant change in such a short time.
WHERE ARE WE? (AND HOW DID WE GET HERE?) GEOGRAPHICAL EXPANSION INTO EMERGING MARKETS
The first telegraph cables were
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installed across the Atlantic Ocean to connect what were then the biggest international markets. As the prevalence of submarine cables began to grow, and services continued to develop, cable reached deeper into markets that were comparatively less significant. If we consider the SeaMeWe 3 (SMW3) cable, which went ready-forservice (RFS) in 1999, as the apotheosis of the consortium cable, we see a system that landed in 39 locations, in 31 countries, construction of which was commissioned by a consortium of European, Middle-Eastern and Asian telecom operators. By the time the construction and maintenance agreement (C&MA) was signed by 92 (yes,
ninety-two, largely state-owned) parties in 1997, the system connected to places as far east as South Korea in the north and Australia, in the south directly to Europe, via the Red Sea. The consortium members were the PTTs of the places where the cable landed.1 It’s difficult for a civilian to access the historical record at this remove, but humor me while I assert that by the time SMW3 followed quickly on from its coaxial predecessors, SMW1 and SMW2, not only had fiber optics matured to the point where they could be deployed underwater and over long distances but, perhaps more 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20010308195229/http:// www.smw3.com/Html_Static/background.htm