Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
often by entering strategic alliances that stretched across national borders. Simi-
larly, Sprint affiliated with France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom to form Global
One in 1996, and AT&T and British Telecom acquired a 30 % share of Japan
Telecom. Under the Club system, capacity was allocated and payments made
before or during construction of the network. Members were required by national
regulators to sell capacity to non-members on a non-discriminatory basis close to
cost. Allegations arose that Club members discriminated against new entrants by
offering disadvantageous conditions of membership, such as capacity prices.
However, as deregulation encouraged new entrants into the cable markets, the
Club system began to fragment. Private systems, in which carriers invite non-
carrier investors such as banks, emerged as an alternative system, and recently,
non-carrier systems have also appeared.
The network of fiber lines linking the world constitutes the nervous system of the
global financial and service economy, linking cities, markets, suppliers, and clients
around the world, and the backbone of internet traffic (Fig.
2.2
). The geography of
global fiber networks centers primary upon two distinct telecommunications
markets crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, connecting two of the major
engines of the world economy, North America and East Asia. In 1988, in con-
junction with MCI and British Telecommunications, AT&T initiated the world's
first trans-oceanic fiber optic cable, Trans-Atlantic Telecommunications (TAT-8),
which could carry 40,000 telephone calls simultaneously. The trans-Atlantic line
was the first of a much broader series of globe-girdling fiber lines that AT&T erected
in conjunction with a variety of local partners. Because large corporate users are the
primary clients of such networks, it is no accident that the original and densest web
of fiber lines connects London and New York, a pattern that extends historically to
the telegraph and telephone (Hugill 1999). The next generation, TAT-9 and TAT-
10, which began in 1992, could carry double the volume of traffic of TAT-8. The
third generation, TAT-11 to TAT-13, was the first to use EDFA rather than older
repeaters. Newer generations of cable were even more powerful. Starting with the
Trans-Pacific Cable (TPC-3) in 1989 connecting New York and Tokyo, a growing
web of trans-Pacific lines mirrored the rise of East Asian trade with North America,
including the surging economies of the Newly Industrialized Countries. In 1996, the
first all-fiber cable across the Pacific, TPC-5, was laid. In 2006, a consortium
including Verizon and five Asian providers announced plans to lay an 11,000 mile
U.S.-China link that would support 1.28 terabits of information—60 times the
capacity of the next largest cable—in time for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. In
2007, Google announced the purchase of large quantities of trans-Pacific fiber cable
with the aim of launching a multi-terabit Unity service in 2009.
The complex interplay of deregulation, globalization, and technological change
increased the international transmission capacities and traffic volumes for fiber
optics carriers explosively. Between 1988 and 2003, for example, trans-Atlantic
fiber optic cable capacity increased from 43,750 voice paths to 45.1 billion
(103,000 %), while across the Pacific Ocean, cable carriers' capacity rose from
1,800 voice paths to 1.87 billion (an astonishing 1.6 billion %).
