Re: Nigeria's High-Speed Cable -- A Well-Kept Secret? (fwd)

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 01:35:04PM -0400, S Woodside wrote:
> So how to turn this to economic advantage? I don't know. I don't know 
> how it was done in the West. Perhaps there were multiple competing 
> cables, that would quickly solve the problem as competition would drive 
> prices down and usage up.

There was an Internet gold rush: companies threw billions at digging up
roads and railway tracks, pulling fibre through tunnels and canals and on
overhead powerlines, on the assumption that Internet would be so crucial to
business that people would pay huge amounts to have access to the bandwidth.
Everyone was selling way below cost to grab "market share" at the expense of
having a viable business model.

The emergence of DWDM, meaning that existing fibres could be used at
capacities hundreds of times higher than before, didn't help matters.

So we got massive oversupply and dirt cheap prices. Which is fine for
everyone, except those who invested of course.

(I don't know what the capacity of SAT-3 is; someone mentioned "5.8 million
calls simultaneously" which translates to about 350Gbps, but that seems
rather on the high side to me)

Regards,

Brian.

-----
This is the afnog mailing list, managed by Majordomo 1.94.5

To send a message to this list, e-mail afnog at afnog.org
To send a request to majordomo, e-mail majordomo at afnog.org and put
your request in the body of the message (i.e use "help" for help)

This list is maintained by owner-afnog at afnog.org