connectivity outside the US

Sun Jun 1 09:03:17 UTC 1997

What you are describing is reasonable in a truly open market environment.
However, the cost of committing to $650K to $800K for E1s limits the field
significantly. Especially when the carriers bid on a large portion of the
available bandwidth. The availability of 100G loops will be diminished by
the more financially sound carriers (i.e., Telstra). I think you know those
guys. When you look at the demand between now and the year 2000 and you
guys will be looking at consuming +200M of the bandwidth for IP services
and God knows how much for the more traditional services. 

Even though the investment has remained relatively constant the market
pricing has not.

I don't see it being a game for the faint hearted. And the massive
consumption from the likes of AT&T, BT/MCI and Worldcom will greatly
influence the pricing. You may see a trend towards reducing the price for
the bulk buyers/investors, but it will not likely come down as fast as your
predict for the low to moderate users. Your assessment may be right, but I
am not so sure we will see it before the year 2000.

Mark
----------
> From: Geoff Huston <gih at telstra.net>
> To: Mark Ansboury <mansboury at yesvirtual.com>
> Cc: Sean M. Doran <smd at clock.org>; avg at pluris.com; bgreene at cisco.com;
jesse at netthink.com; map at iphil.net; nanog at merit.edu; smd at clock.org
> Subject: Re: connectivity outside the US
> Date: Sunday, June 01, 1997 6:04 PM
> 
> Supply and demand - the cables which are being commissioned in late 98
and
> 99 look to be 100G loop designs in bot the Pacific and Atlantic
> environments. The system price looks like remaining pretty constant -
> around $500M give or take a few hundred mil - despite a 50 fold increase
in
> capacity. Its reasonable to expect a radical bottoming out of unit price
> for IRUs sometime in 99 for these cables. What does that mean? The
scarcity
> premium in cable price which will be evident through 98 will be
eliminated
> in 99 and insterad you'll see a return to a technology-indexed unit
price,
> where the price will reflect the basic project costs And given the
increase
> in cable capacity due to WDM deployment you can expect a unit price drop.
> 
> 
> 
> At 12:18 PM 1/6/97 +1000, Mark Ansboury wrote:
> The cost for
> >overseas cables are not going to be coming down in a big way over the
next
> >couple of years. They will more likely go up. At least for our
foreseeable
> >future. The next few years. The pent up demand is to great. 
> 