FEATURE IT’S BEEN ONE HECK OF A RIDE SO FAR
MUSINGS ON ISSUE BY STEPHEN NIELSEN
I
n April 2001, Wayne Nielsen pulled together some of the little capital from the recently established WFN Strategies and bought a ticket to attend SubOptic 2001 in Kyoto. His goal? To use the conference to drum up new business and clients for his burgeoning contracting company. What he found, however, were representatives from all parts of the submarine telecoms industry speaking for the first time in three years and discovering that their industry was in a dire situation. Comparing notes for the first time since the last conference, it was becoming obvious that submarine telecoms was a sinking cable ship and every attending company was still on board.
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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE
“Everybody knew this was it,” said Wayne Nielsen, president and publisher of Submarine Telecoms Forum. “There was no more work. The installers were busy, but not the guys who were building cable, and you’ve got to build the cable first, meaning you’re building systems that were going to be installed a year later. So, we knew the installers were finishing up later in the year and then there was nothing. There was nothing being built. It’s like everything stopped. And, at Kyoto it became apparent.” The Kyoto conference served as an unpleasant epiphany for many submarine telecoms industrialists. For Wayne, however, it also highlighted what, to him, was a glaring deficiency for these businesses.