The Japanese Strike Again: The New Intra-Asian Marine Cable (IAMC)
NTT and Mitsui Leasing have teamed up together with fibre optic cable manufacturer Sumitomo Corporation to fund a 16 fibre pair subsea cable costing $500 million. Design capacity is 320 Tbps. This is the second project on which NTT Data and Mitsui Leasing have cooperated. The high capacity 20 fibre pair Juno cable was the first project. It is unusual to see a large incumbent player like NTT undertaking a subsea cable project with a non-telecom company as co-owner. But the advantages are clear. Mitsui will contribute cash, but not play a major role in design, vendor selection or wholesale commercials. So it not only reduces NTT's risk by sharing funding requirements, but it gives NTT a free hand in decision making. One lesson that has become perfectly clear is that large carrier consortiums increase the likelihood of deployment delays and lengthen the entire planning cycle because decisions require consensus. Moreover, the consensus requirement makes it difficult for new approaches...
