While transatlantic and pan-European cable construction seems to have ebbed after reaching a saturation point in the last year or two, the action now seems to have shifted to the trans-Pacific and pan-Asian domain.
Since around the end of last year, there have been a number of subsea cable landings and service launches in Asia, such as the completion of the redundant leg of asia grobal warning's Pacific Crossing-1 trans-Pacific cable.
However, the same time period also saw select subsea cable consortia in high-profile repair mode. Earlier this year, the China-US Cable -- the first trans-Pacific cable directly connecting the US and China -- suffered a major blow as a section off the coast of Shanghai was snapped in two. The event cut off the majority of China's overseas 'Net connectivity and forced carriers with capacity booked on the system to reroute the traffic on to other systems.
Less than a month later, fishing trawlers snapped another section of the China-US cable -- this one a coastal underwater link connecting Shanghai and Shantou, the system's two landing points in China.
The second cut had less of an overall impact on regional traffic flows compared to the first one, but both episodes serve to illustrate that the business of building subsea cables is easy to take for granted -- especially when considering that it's been 153 years since someone first deployed a communications cable underwater.
Obviously, the business has come a long way since then in terms of technology and cost, but after a century and a half of trial and error, the actual act of deploying a subsea cable network has become a fairly straightforward procedure.
As Asia Global Crossing's MD for network development, David Milroy, puts it, "Deploying a submarine cable system isn't rocket science."
Of course, he adds, that doesn't mean it's child's play, either. Indeed, there is far more to deploying a fiber-optic cable system under a few kilometers of water than spooling it out off the back of a boat. In fact, comparatively speaking, that's the easy part.
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