connectivity outside the US

Sat May 31 19:46:12 UTC 1997

Undersea capacity is expensive for 3 reasons:
   1) It's under the ocean
   2) It's under the ocean
   3) It's under the ocean

For more information than you ever wanted and a great read check out Neal
Stephenson's article:
  http://wwww.wired.com/wired/4.12/motherearth/

Transoceanic cables are actually designed with massive capacity. They're
terribly expensive to lay and maintain though, and demand for
communications has kept good pace with available space - keeping the
price of transit high.

You're right about the lack of competition. To undertake laying
a cable PTT's will join together and divy out capacity, management
responsibilities, etc., in proportion to their investment. This doesn't
leave room for small-quantity pricing, as you'd have to aggregate "massive
quantities" to reach the economies of scale necessary.

--
JMC

On Sat, 31 May 1997, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> smd at clock.org (Sean M. Doran) wrote:
> > Examining this a bit more closely, since undersea capacity is
> > terribly expensive, when there is adequate capacity available
> > to a large aggregate of sites people want to get to, there will
> > be an obvious market for access to that capacity.   
> Actually, i do not understand why undersea capacity is so
> expensive.  Cable is more expensive, yes; but the paths
> are much straighter, and there's no need to purchase
> rights of ways (except for shore-side strips).  There's
> no need to dig trenches -- you just drop the cable off the
> boat.
> I guess the real problem with undersea capacity is more in the
> fact that it was always considered a low-volume service (which
> it is, in terms of voice traffic); so there's no many competitive
> providers, and small-quantity pricing.