Now, Huawei wants to get into submarine cables

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 October 2006 10:50

Deals

Not content with becoming a growing global force in almost every aspect of terrestrial telecommunications networks, China's Huawei Technologies has teamed up with the world's leading installer of submarine cables, Global Marine, in a bid to break into the submarine fibre optic cable market, presently dominated by Alcatel which both manufactures and lays submarine cables. 

• Announcements

The two companies have announced plans to jointly develop "a new generation of end-to-end submarine networking technologies" based on Huawei’s optical technology that will "give submarine network developers and operators a strong alternative that does not compromise capability, security or quality."

Global Marine's CEO, Gabriel Ruhan, suggested that customers believed they were paying too much for current offerings. "Our customers have been asking us to give them alternatives to the high cost of building out submarine networks,” he said

The telecoms and dotcom crash of the 2000 resulted in a dramatic slowdown and rationalisation of the submarine cable industry which saw the number of competing suppliers of cable manufacturing and laying services greatly reduced.

Now,  after half a decade of limited activity in the submarine cable market there are signs of a resurgence as excess capacity on major links is taken up.