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Technology Stocks : Global Crossing - GX (formerly GBLX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (10663)	4/16/2001 8:19:07 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15615

Those are some interesting figures, Bill: "... IRU sales have been becoming less significant for some time and these sales in the Atlantic now represent less than 2% of GX's revenue." One has to wonder what percentage of lit capacity is actually consumed by IRUs? Your assessment concerning this trend has held true over the years. Thirty years ago IRUs were prized as the ultimate in the overseas channel procurement pecking order. Transoceanic cables had limited capacity and quotas were set as to how many private lines and IRUs could be leased, and by which companies/countries, since those were consortium cables that were competing with satellite cables. And the CCITT (ITU) weighed in and used its influence to establish ratios of subsea to satellite channel allocations for each category, as well, just to keep all parties at peace. At the time a submarine channel was a mere 2.9 KHz in width (300Hz to 3200 Hz), and supported a maximum throughput on the order of 1.2kb/s, or pushed 2.4 kb/s for government lines that required special "C-type conditioning." The next step down the pecking order were so-called contract overseas or CO circuits. Both IRUs and COs were obtained from International Record Carriers, or IRCs, such as ITT Worldcom, RCA Global, WUI International, French Cable. The arrangement during that era was that AT&T would not sell overseas data, and the IRCs would not sell overseas voice. COs were of the same capacity as IRUs, but were year to year leases instead of life of the cable. Soon enough those IRUs gave way to COs, and ultimately the COs gave way to regular private leased line status, when the optical transatlantics came of age (circa 1987). IRUs, as they were previously known, all but disappeared from public view until the private optical terrestrial and subsea carriers emerged, several years ago. FAC