[LINK] NBN Connectivity being Threatened....

[Paul Brooks]

On 5/03/2012 2:44 PM, TKoltai wrote:
> This is bad people...
>
> If we Let The Telco's get away with this one, we'll all have Fibre to
> the home connected to .... Telstra.
>
> Anyone else see anything wrong with that long term plan?
>
> Quote/
> Leighton's undersea cable plans on a knife edge 

Nothing to see here - so one proposed undersea cable isn't attracting customers, the
other one is. Telstra may be a 'foundation customer', but that doesn't make them the
only user of bandwidth, or any form of gatekeeper preventing other organisations using it.
This isn't any different from the Pacific Fibre/Optikor (Kordia) cables proposed
between Australia and NZ, or the several proposals that get up or die before build
across any other major ocean in the past few years.

Building both simultaneously is likely to result in poor outcomes for both
organisations, as witnessed by the IP1 vs Nextgen deployments to Perth in 2002-03
(you'd think Leightons would have learnt from that one).

Maybe Leighton's needs to sharpen their pricing relative to Huawei, or delay their
project by 5 - 10 years until the earlier cable fills up - by then 400G lambdas will
be coming onto the market.

The reality is that major network operators want enough redundancy to maintain
services in the event of a failure, but not too much - as you well know, managing
traffic flows across many parallel small pipes is a PITA and leads to poor performance
compared to managing just 2 or 3 large capacity pipes. It would appear the major
network operators have sufficient numbers of alternative routes/cables into Asia that
they prefer to expand capacity on the routes/cables they are on (or will soon be) and
don't need to diversify across yet another cable.

 P.