THE TELECOMS INDUSTRY has undergone something of a subsea revolution . Whilst subsea cables built 30 years ago were both expensive and time-consuming , they were also only built for telephone calls between corresponding operators on either side of the ocean .
The partnership of US operators such as AT & T , Sprint and Verizon , as well as European operators British Telecom , France Télécom , Deutsche Telekom and others enabled the development of subsea cables which could handle increased volume of calls .
However , with private entities deployed across the Atlantic , it was international provider Cable & Wireless which built a private cable to America in a bid to sell capacity to smaller operators emerging in Europe .
Providing a competitive threat to the pricing of telephone calls , the space for providers to privately build infrastructures and sell them in alignment with the life of the cable was born , and filtered into the development of the internet .
Impacting the way undersea cables are designed , the internet fuelled a consumer demand for connectivity . With an increased need to send low-speed data over a telephone call-style channel , the launch of 9.6kb dial-up modems created a crossover , where providers sought to turn a telephone-capable cable into a data cable .
Despite this , whilst the number of consortiums and telcos sought to build cables to cater to this rapid demand , the dot . com bubble burst and led to not only an oversupply , but a subsequent crash within the telecoms sector . “ There were competing organisations with brand new
90 April 2018