The news is repetitive: layoffs in the thousands, debt in the billions, attempts to strengthen balance sheets. Reporters quote financial analysts talking about a “market correction” and “the worst I’ve seen it.” Colleagues depart, budgets get cut, the frequency of staff meetings—and the scrutiny of management—both rise.
But as bad as it is right now, the worldwide telecom market continues to grow. It continues to employ thousands of people and provide them careers and livings at many economic levels. It continues to enjoy robust technology development and even hints of optimism when you look past these immediate difficult times. We are in the middle of a bad storm…maybe golf-ball-sized hail. But it’s
A Bad Storm, Not a Perfect Storm: The Submarine Market in Context George Miller and Sally Sheedy, KMI Research 19
not a so-called perfect storm, whose promise is an end to all. When this storm passes, the worldwide telecom industr y will not have been dismantled, nor its millions of kilometers of infrastructure abandoned. It will not undergo a catastrophic meltdown, as the dot-coms did. It has a real and steady core in the millions of phone conversations and data transmissions that take place every day, all around the world. It will resume steady growth, enjoying robust technology development and providing thousands of people with careers and livings at many economic levels.
The How and The When To put the submarine market in context, look first at the state of the worldwide telecom market. A general measure of its health and growth is deployment of fiberoptic cable. It is measured in several ways, among them route-kilometers (the length of cable deployed) and fiber-kilometers (the number of fibers within a cable multiplied by the length of cable deployed).