Pretty quiet over here.
From tonight's Financial Times, an interesting article on another company putting in undersea cable:
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ecoms
Global TeleSystems to buy into sub-sea cable
By Alan Cane
Global TeleSystems Group (GTS), a US-based telecommunications operator focusing on the European market, is planning to invest in a new, $1bn trans-Atlantic cable system in collaboration with Flag Telecom.
Gerald Thames, GTS chief executive, said the new system, the first designed to work at speeds of over a thousand billion bits of information a second, would be critical to GTS's plans to link Europe's leading cities.
He rejected suggestions that GTS and Colt, a fast-growing UK-based operator building networks around Europe's financial centres, were in merger talks. "It takes two to tango and nobody's dancing at the moment," he said, although he revealed that the two companies had had inconclusive merger discussions a year ago.
Flag, which carries telecoms traffic for over 75 of the world's leading operators, is a privately financed venture which has already created a cable system stretching 27,000km from the UK to Japan.
With the addition of the new cable system - Flag Atlantic-1 - the group will cover 40,000km and provide direct access to the telecoms and internet markets of the US and Japan.
Financing will be through a combination of equity contributions from GTS and Flag, sales of capacity to customers, but principally through non-recourse bank debt.
Mr Thames said yesterday there was no shortage of finance for sub-sea cable ventures like Flag Atlantic-1, as the demand for data transmission capacity across the Atlantic was so great.
The new cable system is integral to GTS's plan to become the leading independent operator of telecommunications services for businesses and other carriers in Europe. At the end of last year it bought Esprit, a UK-based operator with its own switches and infrastructure, which had been one of its main European rivals.
GTS's principal vehicle is its majority-owned subsidiary Hermes Europe Railtel, which provides trans-border transport services exclusively to telecoms service providers in Europe.
Mr Thames said yesterday that the group had already sunk enough fibre cabling in the ground across Europe to carry up to 20 times the total current traffic across the continent.
He said that by the end of 1999, GTS would be able to offer long-distance and international services across Europe at a single price. It would be able to offer low prices because, owning a network, it would not have to pay interconnection fees to other carriers.
"Our goal by 2003 is to be one of the top two or three pan European carriers," Mr Thames said.
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