On 11/03/2010, at 1:02 PM, Matthew Moyle-Croft wrote:
Hi Tony,
I don't really agree - there's no need to purchase a full protect path from a single system.
In other words you are providing "protection" via IS-IS rather than the SDH frame K bits (or whatever they called the end-to-end integrity bits in SDH systems). Quite frankly there are no telephony buyers left in the undersea cable market - its all IP, so saying that cable protection becomes an IP role is now a viable course of action, but you are also assuming that your buyers are all big enough to be in a position to purchase multiple unprotected IRUs on diverse cable systems. Again these days thats not a totally unreasonable assumption. So I agree with Mattheew - the days of buying fully protected 1+1 paths off a single cable system supplier are fading away, and the economics of building fully protected dual paths are a lot more challenging than putting in single path undersea systems. But there is a huge supply overhang in today's market of installed capacity in a number of areas, including to ANZ, and these kind of long term high capital volume investments all run a risk of market collapse through oversupply, as happened in the Northern Pacific 8 years back (I seem to recall it happened to a lesser extent on SC and AJC as well at the time, and IRU prices on both these systems were quite cheap back in the 2001 - 2005 period. I also suspect that it was SC attempting to extract too much money from Telstra in 2006 - 2007 that was a major motivation for the construction of Endeavour, but that is of course pure speculation on my part.) I would understand this particular project announcement more if this were part of a play by a few competitors to push SC into dropping their IRU prices. ("play nice with us or we'll go and spend $900 M of some bank's money!") If this is really a serious play to build another long haul ANZ - US undersea cable, and if it were my bank that was in the process underwriting yet another undersea cable project into an already over-supplied market that has a limited set of buyers, I'd be getting a tad concerned by now. Geoff - speaking purely and totally for himself, of course. (gosh! I've just done two postings to NZNOG in a few hours. Sorry - I'll shut up now for another year or two!)