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To: Boplicity who wrote (4892)	11/2/1998 2:16:00 PM
From: Boplicity	Respond to of 21876

Project Oxygen Could Drive Down Telecom Costs New Jersey-Based Company is Building Global Fiber-Optic Network By Neil Winton Reuters LONDON (Nov. 2) - A little-known New Jersey company building a global fiber-optic network says its $10 billion project will drive down the cost of telephone, Internet and television services. CTR Group Ltd., based in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., is close to finalizing almost $3 billion of financing for the first phase of Project Oxygen, its plan to build a mainly undersea fiber-optic network using 100,000 miles of cable, said its founder and chief executive officer, Neil Tagare. ''The system will have tremendous capacity ... and will meet the need for more global bandwidth (capacity). It will revolutionize the delivery of Internet services, video, data, and drive down costs for the world's carriers and their customers in the process,'' Tagare said in an interview. CTR, which intends to build the project over three years starting in the first quarter of 1999, will sell use of the network to other telecommunications companies rather than provide telecommunications services itself. The first phase of construction will cover 78 countries. Analysts said that if successful, Project Oxygen would leapfrog the technology currently used by telecommunicationscompanies and slash their costs. ''Two things are unique about Project Oxygen,'' said Abhi Chaki, senior analyst at Jupiter Communications in New York. ''It is a network, not a point-to-point submarine cable. This means that bandwidth could be allocated globally to carriers. ''The second factor is that it is one of the very few bandwidth ventures not being bankrolled by 'first world' telcos (leading telephone companies),'' Chaki said by e-mail. Telephone capacity is currently owned by a handful of wealthy companies, he said. ''MCI, BT (British Telecommunications Plc), NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp.), AT&T, Bell Atlantic own, operate and then lease point-to-point bandwidth to other carriers at inflated rates. Project Oxygen, if successful, will challenge their hegemony,'' Chaki said. CTR Group's Tagare said his company's project was similar to MCI WorldCom Inc.'s plan to link various fiber-optic hubs across Europe. ''Worldcom in Europe probably goes to about a dozen countries at most. But we want to do the same thing all over the world. It's a market that's completely unexploited. ... We believe that this is the next-generation Internet,'' he said. Tagare said CTR didn't want big telephone companies to invest in the venture. It would be easier to sell capacity to telephone companies if the company was perceived as neutral. ''We are looking for strategic investors. The kinds of companies that might come in would be in media, entertainment, software, anything that benefits from a global explosion of bandwidth,'' said Tagare. ''Project Oxygen is almost a pure play in the three industries: cable TV, global Internet and the global telephony market. Any companies that see their business benefiting from global scale are going to be interested. ''The entire project is going to cost more than $10 billion. The first stage of the project is going to cost about $3 are in the final stages of putting that financial structure together,'' Tagare said. In May, Lucent Technologies Inc. of Murray Hill, N.J., said it had won a four-year contract to provide CTR with more than $1 billion worth of networking equipment for the project. Tagare said growth prospects in the sector were awesome. ''We are looking at an industry that will grow at triple-digit rates in many countries of the world in the next 10 years.''