On 14 Sep 2008, at 23:38, Matthew Moyle-Croft wrote:
Other cable systems predated FLAG (at least for voice).
The qualifier might be important. As should have been obvious from all the IIRCs and related qualifiers in my note, I wasn't in Europe at the time I started paying attention to these things. However, in other parts of the world, circuits provisioned and planned for voice traffic growth started to become effectively full as soon as there was demand for circuits much bigger than an E1. As an example, PacRimEast still had capacity in the late 90s, strictly speaking. But given the difficulty in ordering anything other than E1s on it at that time, did it really exist as a terrestrial option for New Zealand ISPs trying to send packets to the US? There was a lot of satellite transmission sold around that time on PanAmSat, IntelSat and Loral transponders, and it's not as if anybody was really using satellite out of choice. There are only so many discrete E1s you can comfortably inverse-mux together before it's really not worth bothering. The timelines are no doubt different, since Europe experienced a giant boom in Internet demand and infrastructure while smaller markets like New Zealand were still preoccupied with X.25. However, the original question was whether there had ever been a time during which Europe had no option but to cross oceans to get to Asia, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't the case. Perhaps someone who actually knows this stuff can throw some facts into the thread and put a stop to my wild speculation.
SEA-ME-WE predates FLAG by almost a decade. I'm sure some digging would reveal a bit more on that path either submarine or terrestrial.
The contract to build SEA-ME-WE-4 was signed in March 2004, according to their web page. SEA-ME-WE-3 was commissioned in March 2000 in India, according to Wikipedia. The Europe-Asia segment of FLAG was lit in the mid-1990s. Joe