Hello Joe, thanks for those kind words of encouragement. I see that you get the gist of the potential, by your depiction of the coming economies and the competitive landscapes, where server farms are concerned.
Bringing this back into context, it should be interesting to note that most of these [almost-] purely optical enablers require both dark fiber, and/or open windows into shared fiber strands.
These approaches are only feasible through the use of fairly abundant quantities discreet wavelenghts, support by a similarly abundant number of dark fibers along a given route. Increasingly, these attributes are beginning to characterize many parts of the domestic front (by such companies as MFNX, and fiber placements through private contractors and subleases from cable companies, for example), but this kind of optical spectrum availability on the international front is still some distance off.
GBLX and its competitors have very few strands per route, usually on the order of from 8 to 16, effectively making this mode of wide open networking appear almost lavish at this time. Despite the higher number of lambdas (wavelengths) permitted by the newer DWDM devices they employ, their overall supplies will still be too limited for the foreseeable future to allow the same kinds of networking schemes that will be permissible locally, especially in dense urban areas where fiber densities are high.
In other words, international carriers will not be able to scale their fiber spectrum to the same proportions as domestic optical profiles (due to the lack of dark fiber availability) until DWDMs yield far greater numbers of wavelengths, and/or additional strands are added to their routes. Until then, it will continue to be a game of bandwidth rationing to user organization and carrier customers.
For GBLX investors, this is not a bad thing at all. Very good, in fact. Because it highlights the supply-demand dynamics that will make even its limited infrastructure (in comparison to domestics, but by no means in comparison to other internationals) that much more valuable, when viewed on a per unit of capacity basis.
Comments welcome.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
