WCA January 2011

From the americas

business unit at NTT America Inc (New York). “And a lot of them [run only up and down] the Atlantic seaboard.” Ms Scarpati confirmed that – compared with the large amount of undersea cable between California and Japan, say, or New York and Britain – the submarine cable system landing in South America appears paltry, particularly below the Equator. She wrote, “Central America and the Caribbean fare better, benefiting from their proximity to North America and the ample number of landing points on the various islands.” While an ocean-floor cable network is not a project to be ❖ ❖ undertaken lightly, to those operators seriously interested in tapping the potential of Latin America it may present the least challenging approach. New Jersey-based telecom consultant TomNolle told SearchTelecom that, throughout many parts of the region, fixed-line isn’t always financially or logistically feasible, and wireless is constrained by line-of-sight. Accordingly, he said, undersea cable is the best option to connect countries within Central and South America and to the rest of the world. “If you’re going through the jungles of Panama or northern Colombia, I wouldn’t want to try to install cables through that mess,” Mr Nolle said. “At that point, it would be cheaper to start at a place like Bogotá and [trench] undersea cable.”

Writing in SearchTelecom.com, Jessica Scarpati went on to consider the prospects for telecom operators interested in Latin America’s potential. Having only so many new revenue opportunities in mature markets like North America, these operators, she said, are trying “desperately” to drum up new services to compensate for a saturated market weighed down by sluggish growth in average revenue per user (ARPU). (“Latin America Poised for Growth, Challenged by Lack of Undersea Cable,” 5 th October) Latin America is clearly a land of opportunity for operators in that situation. According to the latest Visual Networking Index released by Cisco Systems, consumer and business Internet protocol (IP) traffic there is expected to show a 51% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the period 2009-2014, faster than in any other region. This puts Latin America ahead of the Middle East and Africa, each with a 45% CAGR over the five years. Mobile data will likely be the fastest-growing category of IP traffic almost everywhere, with Latin America expected to achieve a 111% CAGR through 2014. The outlook for Latin America is too good to have escaped notice. But, vis-à-vis North America, Asia and Europe, the region is woefully underserved by undersea cable. “There are not that many systems that go down there,” said Michael Wheeler, vice president of the global IP network

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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2011