Oceanic Cable Means Ocean Of Change
(05/04/99, 11:58 a.m. ET)
By Mark Rockwell, tele.com
The once sedate world of transoceanic telephone transmission, with help from the Internet, is beginning to morph into a vibrant, multifaceted mix-master of a market -- at least to hear officials from one of the market's most ambitious players tell it.
Project Oxygen, whose aim is to build a worldwide fiber network via its own broadband undersea cables, is closing in on its first few billion dollars of funding, which it will use to begin construction of a portion of a 168,000-kilometer-long network loop. That loop will serve the Atlantic Ocean from Brazil to Florida, New York, England, France, and Spain, according to David Martin, Project Oxygen's vice president of business development in an interview with tele.com. Equity partners are ponying up $1.2 billion, while another $1.8 billion is being borrowed from banks to finance the first loop. The entire worldwide project will cost more than $15 billion, according to the company.
The initial $3 billion in funding for the Atlantic portion of the network could be completed as early as this summer, with network construction beginning immediately after that. Completion of the Atlantic portion is slated for 2001, said Martin.
The entire network worldwide, with completion projected sometime in 2002, will cover 168,000 km and link 265 landing points in 171 different countries. It will operate at 2.56 terabits per second (2,560 gigabits) using dense WDM technology. It will also change the way a range of companies do business, not only through sheer bandwidth and speed, but also in the way its global network operates, said Martin.
For instance, Project Oxygen wants to provide service not only to the stock cast of international carriers such as AT&T, but also to newer telecommunications services entrants such as ISPs and even television broadcasters that want to transmit images across oceans, Martin said. "We could provide pricing 100 times cheaper than satellites" for television capacity, he said.
The network will also have different pricing structures than regular point-to-point undersea links, making for more cost-conscious ways for carriers to operate. Some international carriers "charge $77 million for a point to point link between Japan to United Kingdom. We'd charge $2 million for the same link," he said -- the difference being Project Oxygen's network, when completed, would be just that, a network. It would be one with many of the same characteristics of the Internet, where traffic is distance-insensitive, he added.
Martin scoffed at the notion that, along with other ambitious transoceanic links, as well as national fiber links, an overabundance of capacity will result. Far from it, he said. The need for bandwidth will never go away, he added, as more, as-yet undreamed-of applications come around.
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