Walking a Mile in Our Customers Shoes Being a System Supplier with Owner and Operator Experience
By Dr William Marra
As the Chief Technical Officer of Tyco Telecommunications, I am often asked how I balance the responsibility for the development of new technologies in our undersea system supply business while simultaneously managing the engineering and operation of the Tyco Global Network, which includes extensive amounts of fiber infrastructure, dozens of PoPs and cable stations around the globe, and all of the services and products that we deliver to our capacity customers. The answer that I give is always the same: When it comes to developing new technologies for the system supply market, the Tyco Global Network (TGN) provides us with a valuable and unique testing ground for differentiating what is important to a system purchaser from that which is superfluous. Typically, the trend amongst all of the turnkey undersea system suppliers has been to increase the intrinsic traffic-carrying capacity of each new system and bring new, higher-capacity 21
technologies to market as soon as possible. Until recently, the most desirable technology was always the one that provided the greatest capacity by packing the largest number of carrier channels into the available optical bandwidth. The underlying belief was that the greater the overall bandwidth of a system, the lower the cost per individual circuit would be, thus making the system more financially attractive. In addition, the prospect of having extra fiber pairs was seen as a supplementary means of system financing; the sale of fiber pairs could generate sufficient revenue to cover a significant portion of the initial system construction cost. This mindset resulted in the installation of a great deal of undersea infrastructure, which focused suppliers on dealing with ways to satisfy the prevailing market demand volumes while diverting them from focusing on the issues that most concern system purchasers: cost (both construction and operations), performance, and schedule. These three parameters are inter-woven