Now, Huawei wants to get into submarine cables

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 October 2006 10:50

IT Industry - Deals

However submarine cable systems require massive investment, have a long design life (typically 25 years), can have a severe impact on owners' revenues and services to customers when the fail and are difficult and costly to repair.

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For all these reasons, potential customers are likely to take a lot of convincing before giving business to a new and inexperienced player in the market such as Huawei in favour a tried and tested veteran such as Alcatel.

Alcatel claims to lead the industry both in terms of the data carrying capacity of its technology - 8.4Tbps for long-haul systems and 10Tbps for short-haul systems, using the latest dense wavelength-division multiplexing techniques - and in the number of installations carried out: over 450,000 km of submarine networks, enough to circle the globe at the Equator 11 times. The company has been involved in most of the major submarine projects recently launched such as Sea-Me-We 4, FALCON, Sea-Me-We 3 upgrade, Global Caribbean Network, Orascom Telecom, Columbus Communications and Neptune.

The cable laying and maintenance arms of both Alcatel and Global Marine both stretch back to the dawn of the industry 150 years ago, and Alcatel has been involved in the manufacture of submarine fibre optic technology since the beginning of the industry (the first transatlantic submarine fibre cable TAT-8 was laid in 1988 (by one of Global Marine's predecessors). Just two years later, Alcatel opened a submarine fibre optic cable plant in Sydney.