On 15/09/2008, at 10:36 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
On 14 Sep 2008, at 23:38, Matthew Moyle-Croft wrote:
Other cable systems predated FLAG (at least for voice).
The qualifier might be important.
As should have been obvious from all the IIRCs and related
qualifiers in my note, I wasn't in Europe at the time I started
paying attention to these things. However, in other parts of the
world, circuits provisioned and planned for voice traffic growth
started to become effectively full as soon as there was demand for
circuits much bigger than an E1.
As an example, PacRimEast still had capacity in the late 90s,
strictly speaking. But given the difficulty in ordering anything
other than E1s on it at that time, did it really exist as a
terrestrial option for New Zealand ISPs trying to send packets to
the US?
yes, for Australia, certainly. A number of us were using E1 inverse
MUX units to pull higher channel rates out of the circuits. Same thing
happened a few years later with muxing up 155Mbpsd circuits.
There was a lot of satellite transmission sold around that time on
PanAmSat, IntelSat and Loral transponders, and it's not as if
anybody was really using satellite out of choice. There are only so
many discrete E1s you can comfortably inverse-mux together before
it's really not worth bothering.
heh heh - we ran out of cable capacity before we ran out of cascading
inverse muxes at the time! Satellite really was a very inferior choice.
The timelines are no doubt different, since Europe experienced a
giant boom in Internet demand and infrastructure while smaller
markets like New Zealand were still preoccupied with X.25. However,
the original question was whether there had ever been a time during
which Europe had no option but to cross oceans to get to Asia, and
I'd be surprised if that wasn't the case.
The original telegraph circuits in the latter half of the 19th century
were largely overland, but, unless there are markets you want to
intercept with in the middle, undersea tends to be a better option
where you consider all aspects (territorial rights, political issues,
total length, stability etc etc). There was a very informative article
by Neal Stephenson in Wired some years back that was published at
about the time FLAG was being constructed which still is about the
best article on the submarine cable business I've read. Everyone
interested in this submarine cable game except Joe should read it.
The problem with the routes in that part of the word include: the
Wallace line, territorial waters, shallow waters, the Luzon strait,
the stability of overland segments, the size of the markets in the
middle, the cost and availability of the alternatives, and the major
factor that spending 100% of your investment money to optimise 80% of
your traffic needs makes more sense than many other investment
strategies - hence the outcome that the Pacific has become the heavily
favoured route for submarine cable systems in this area of the world.
Perhaps someone who actually knows this stuff can throw some facts
into the thread and put a stop to my wild speculation.
nah - more fun to watch you speculate Joe.
