The submarine cable boom is back with a vengeance. In recent months, Asia has seen several new undersea systems kick off, such as Tata's TGN-IA, which links Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Vietnam and the Philippines with initial design capacity of 3.8 Tbps and the Asia America Gateway cable, linking southeast Asia to the US. Meanwhile, Pipe Networks' PPC-1 cable, which links Sydney, Guam, Papua New Guinea, Tokyo and San Jose, was set to launch this month as we went to press.
That's just in the Pacific.
Research firm TeleGeography estimates that by the time 2009 is over (if all goes according to plan) 16 new undersea cables will be in place. That's more than the number of submarine systems built in 2001, the height of the subsea bandwidth bubble. And there's more where that came from - TeleGeography also says around $2.4 billion worth of new submarine cable projects are scheduled to be finished in the next two years.
The motivation behind the push for all this fresh subsea capacity isn't a mystery. Some more numbers from TeleGeography: international traffic growth accelerated to 79% this year, up from 61% in 2008. Tellingly, much of that is coming from emerging markets like Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Middle East, where traffic growth this year alone has topped well over 100%. Break it down by country and you find that Vietnam's bandwidth usage is expected to grow from 22.8 Gbps in 2008 to grow 13 times to 302.4 Gbps in 2013. Thailand will see a tenfold growth in bandwidth requirements in the same time frame.
"We're seeing tremendous demand that's not always coming from the usual places," says Pacnet CEO Bill Barney. "We're looking at 3G, Chinese broadband deployment, video, cable TV on broadband in China, Indian consumer connectivity going bananas, also Indonesia and Thailand."
Little wonder network operators have added 9.4 Tbps of new capacity this year, TeleGeography says.
Naturally, keeping up with that hunger for bandwidth isn't just a matter of building new cable systems but also upgrading capacity in existing links.
Consequently, carriers are entertaining various options to accomplish that. One option gaining traction is upgrading 10G wavelengths to 40G.