The Deadly Mistakes That Wholesale Subsea Cable Providers Make: Part 1
I've been in telecom since 1992. This qualifies me as an 'old fart' or 'dinosaur fossil' as American teenagers would say. This means I've seen every mistake made by subsea cable capacity owners. 1. Buying lots of capacity between cable landing stations, but owning no fibre from the CLS to the customers' destinations, namely the popular carrier neutral data centers. You can't be competitive if you must buy 100G or 400G metro waves from a UK landing station to Slough Equinix. Lease a dark fibre pair ring and light it with DWDM. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. Those network investments will dramatically improve operating margins. The amazing thing is that PPT members of cable consortiums make this mistake all the time. If it is worth spending $55 million for an undersea fibre pair, then it is worth adding a couple million to the pot for back haul IRUs. 2. Refusing to extend the network to new locations unless the order achieves an investment thre...