Until market demand justifies more undersea cable and drives down prices, NTT America must be more efficient in its operations, he added. NTT recently began upgrading its legacy Cisco Systems Catalyst 6509 switches to Cisco's Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 series, which runs on Cisco's IOS XR operating system (OS).
The more advanced platform enables NTT's engineers to repair or upgrade services without taking the entire platform down, which is akin to repairing part of an engine while the car is still running.
Part of what's hindering the expansion of undersea cable in Latin America is uncertain return on investment (ROI) inherent to developing economies, according to Nolle. Because submarine cable systems are such a massive investment, carriers and other undersea cable providers are waiting for the market to get strong enough to support businesses that need to communicate with colleagues, customers, partners and suppliers elsewhere in the world, he said.
Investment goes where the ROI is, and in order for carriers to be willing to provide communications services there, enterprise customers must be willing to pay because residential Internet services will not be enough, Nolle said.
"I just don't see how the return on investment could be developed unless there was a need for [business] relationships [to be] supported by communications," he said.
But throughout many parts of Latin America, undersea cable will be the best option to interconnect countries within Central and South America and to the rest of the world, Nolle added. Fixed line isn't always financially or logistically feasible and wireless is constrained by line of sight, Nolle said.
"If you're going through the jungles of Panama or northern Colombia, I wouldn't want to try to install cables through that mess," he said. "At that point, it would be cheaper to start at a place like Bogotá and [trench] undersea cable."
Jessica Scarpati is a news writer at SearchTelecom.com
This article originally appeared on SearchTelecom.com