Supply and demand - the cables which are being commissioned in late 98 and 99 look to be 100G loop designs in bot the Pacific and Atlantic environments. The system price looks like remaining pretty constant - around $500M give or take a few hundred mil - despite a 50 fold increase in capacity. Its reasonable to expect a radical bottoming out of unit price for IRUs sometime in 99 for these cables. What does that mean? The scarcity premium in cable price which will be evident through 98 will be eliminated in 99 and insterad you'll see a return to a technology-indexed unit price, where the price will reflect the basic project costs And given the increase in cable capacity due to WDM deployment you can expect a unit price drop. At 12:18 PM 1/6/97 +1000, Mark Ansboury wrote: The cost for
overseas cables are not going to be coming down in a big way over the next couple of years. They will more likely go up. At least for our foreseeable future. The next few years. The pent up demand is to great.