Transoceanic cables are actually designed with massive capacity. They're terribly expensive to lay and maintain though, and demand for communications has kept good pace with available space - keeping the price of transit high.
Worldcom and Cable & Wireless are in the process of laying a 20 Gbps transatlantic sonet (DWDM) system which they claim doubles the current transatlantic capacity. The southern route should be done by November of this year with the first capacity available for the end of the year. The northern route, which will close the ring, will be done in '98. Before we bought them, MFS had already started working on a ring around europe and metro area networks in several cities over there. All this means that we should see a significant drop in trans- atlantic bandwidth (and even intra-europe) charges in the near future. The full press release on this (called project Gemini) should be available on www.wcom.com or nasdaq.com. regards,chris -- Chris Whittenburg Data Network Mechanic (918) 590-5845 Worldcom Inc. chris.whittenburg@wcom.com