Guam's Emergence As A Major Telecom Hub - Part 1

The Pacific and Southeast Asia have two major telecom hubs: Tokyo and Singapore. Tokyo's status reflects its importance as the capital of one of Asia's largest economies with huge trade and financial flows with the United States as well as a defense treaty. Tokyo dominates Japan like Paris does France.


Singapore's emergence reflects Hong Kong's downfall due to the Chinese government's failure to honor its commitment to HK autonomy. China requires any political candidate for HK office to be approved by it. Hence every HK politician is de facto a Beijing puppet. Secondly, China's security laws allow the arrest of anyone criticizing the Chinese government. The collapse of HK's rule of law is illustrated by numerous arrests of anyone peacefully opposing the government. You can go to jail for wearing a T-shirt advocating HK independence.

In contrast, Singapore is neutral in the geopolitical war between the US and China and its judges are independent of the state. It is a very business friendly city without much censorship or authoritarian rule. It's not a perfect democracy, but adequate for the business community's purposes. The Singapore government wants its city to be the dominant Asian telecom hub and has succeeded through carefully executed policies. Consequently, it is easy to operate and build cables in Singapore's territorial waters. The main drawback is that cables must share landing stations. Achieving end-to-end diversity in many cases is impossible.

Readers living in monarchies or dictatorships need to understand that democracy is more than just majority voting. It encompasses a wide range of individual and corporate political, legal, and civil rights. It includes independent institutions including the police, judicial system, central bank, and regulatory agencies. The private sector does not want to be at the whim of an all-powerful monarchy like in the Middle East or a party with unlimited power like in China.

Democracy is good for business. Analysts call it 'predictability', but it is really about fairness and a reasonable way for a society to achieve change and accountability without use of arms. Voting is a bloodless way of rejecting bad leadership whereas the only alternative in China or the Middle East is revolution. Moreover, violent revolution may achieve its aims (US or France) or may result in something worse ex post like Iran's oppressive theocracy.

Today the Pacific is a Tokyo-Singapore telecom hub duopoly. Most regional Internet peering takes place in those two cities; subsea cables are its arteries. Hence the telecom ecosystem is not resilient. Losing either city due to an earthquake or other devastation would completely disrupt Pacific Rim communications. The December 2006 Taiwanese earthquake caused 11 cables to go dark; the entire Pacific Rim was in chaos. Any direct hit on either Tokyo or Singapore would cause much greater disruption.

To be continued ...

Map of Fibre Optic Subsea Cables Serving Japan

Map Of Fibre Optic Subsea Cables Landing in Singapore

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