application” that would rapidly gobble up all this capacity.
The Future’s Bright, the Future’s……. In Asia and the Pacific By Graham Evans
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When the wheels fell off the submarine cable industry in 2001, the interminable post mortems that were conducted in the press and at conferences repeatedly pointed to the massive overbuild of long haul system capacity, citing terabits of unlit capacity, dark fibers and future upgrades as reasons why we could be waiting many years before new long haul systems would be built (a fact that continues to be borne out in the Atlantic). How many of us sat through the depressing round table
discussions year after year at such august events as PTC and SubOptic amidst ever decreasing audiences as round after round of retrenchments took their toll. At the same time we were being repeatedly told that the hangover we were suffering resulted from over indulgence that had been made possible by the combination of deregulation, easy money and unsustainable or simply bad business models, not to mention the often vaunted belief that we were on the cusp of the somewhat nebulous “killer
In the Pacific, much of the unlit capacity remains, although some dark fibers have been lit and some upgrades have been implemented; however, Asia and the Pacific led the way in the resurgence of the submarine telecommunications industry; in fact, as an Asia Pacific based company strongly focused on the submarine cable industry, it was with some relief that new projects continued to be built even through the worst of the slump. Of course, many of these projects were comparatively small domestic or intraregional systems measured in hundreds rather than thousands of kilometers in length, so hardly testing the production capacity of the major suppliers. During this period, some significant systems were built such as i2i and the Tata Indicom, system (TIC) both linking Singapore to India, and of course SEA ME WE 4 in 2004 which although an Asia to Europe system, had significant Asian influence driving it forward. 2006 saw the real beginning of the “boom” we are currently experiencing, and this boom was centered fairly and squarely on the Asian and Pacific Regions. The current round of activity started with the Gondwana, Australia to New Caledonia system incorporating new generation “skinny route” technology; Telstra’s Australia to Hawaii system was rolled out about the same time and not one but four trans Pacific systems were announced;