Undersea capacity is expensive for 3 reasons: 1) It's under the ocean 2) It's under the ocean 3) It's under the ocean For more information than you ever wanted and a great read check out Neal Stephenson's article: http://wwww.wired.com/wired/4.12/motherearth/ 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. You're right about the lack of competition. To undertake laying a cable PTT's will join together and divy out capacity, management responsibilities, etc., in proportion to their investment. This doesn't leave room for small-quantity pricing, as you'd have to aggregate "massive quantities" to reach the economies of scale necessary. -- JMC On Sat, 31 May 1997, Vadim Antonov wrote:
Examining this a bit more closely, since undersea capacity is terribly expensive, when there is adequate capacity available to a large aggregate of sites people want to get to, there will be an obvious market for access to that capacity. Actually, i do not understand why undersea capacity is so expensive. Cable is more expensive, yes; but the paths are much straighter, and there's no need to purchase rights of ways (except for shore-side strips). There's no need to dig trenches -- you just drop the cable off the boat. I guess the real problem with undersea capacity is more in the fact that it was always considered a low-volume service (which it is, in terms of voice traffic); so there's no many competitive
smd@clock.org (Sean M. Doran) wrote: providers, and small-quantity pricing.