There’s plenty of room left in the Unity cable system being built across the Pacific by a consortium of carriers led by Google and PacNet for new members to join.
The US$300 million Google-conceived Unity cable was announced by a consortium consisting of India’s Bharti Airtel, Malaysia data centre specialist Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel. The 10,000 km linear cable will connect Chikura, located off the coast near Tokyo, and Los Angeles, California. The project is scheduled to be completed by 2010.
Current plans are for a five fibre pair system with a design capacity of 960Gbps (96 wavelengths x 10 Gbps) per fibre pair. However, the project is scalable to eight fibre pairs, and new members can still join the project in the lead up to the start of construction.
“When it is laid in the water, it will be either five, six, seven or eight fibre pairs, and it will be all own by somebody,” Pacnet CEO Bill Barney told CommsDay, hinting at ongoing discussions with potential new partners. “In the next thirty days, we may add one of two (members).”
According to Barney, Unity's ownership model differs from traditional consortium based system in that Pacnet will effectively operate its own system within the cable, while the other members will share the remaining three committed fibre pairs.
“Basically, we have our own system called EAC-Pacific, which is the same shape as the Unity project being built at the same time, which has 3 fiber pairs divided up among those players (consortium members),” Barney said.
“It (EAC-Pacific) is independent in that we can upgrade it when we want to. The consortia have a different set of rules. We can do whatever we want.”
What is shared between all the members is the maintenance of the system under a signal maintenance contract and the cable landing stations. Once the cable enters the cable landing station, then it is up to the members to decide how to connect to other services. “Coming out the back, we can have separate backhauls, or we can share backhaul if we choose to, all these are options,” he added. “This is not the first cable that is built this way – it is probably the seventh or eighth cable to be built like this. It is a common model across the Atlantic.”
John Hibbard, submarine cable industry consultant, says the model represents competitors working together in a true wholesale fashion.
“The concept of owning fibre pairs effectively means that we have several cables in the same sheath,” Hibbard said. “This is a very efficient way to go about cable provision – one survey, one set of landing permits, one set of the cable ships yet a totally individual choice on end-equipment and application.”
DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES: While the new cable will effectively extend Pacnet’s regional system to the US, Barney says the main goal of EAC-Pacific is mostly about lowering the cost of access to the US.
“We spend US$30-US$40million every year on trans-Pacific capacity,” he said. “From our perspective in terms of our business plans, it just lowers our costs of access to the US. I wouldn't call this an offensive strategy. It is a very defensive strategy because all it does is gives us a low cost supply to the US. That’s what we are trying to do. We’re not trying to go after the market necessarily, we just want to meet our own requirements.”
The same strategy was also offered by Google, which stated on its website yesterday: “If you’re wondering whether we're going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no. We're not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we’ve exceeded the ability traditional players can offer. Our partnership with these companies is just another step in ensuring that we're delivering the best possible experience to people around the world.”
Another consortium member, SingTel, cites diversity as a key reason for its investment. “As it is connected to other cable systems in Asia, it will also provide access to other parts of the region and serve as an important cable diversity route,” said SingTel executive vice president for networks, Mark Chong.
POTENTIAL CHALLENGES: While he commends the operators for adopting the ownership model, Hibbard warns of potential challenges: “Management of the system could be the great challenge – marrying together the strongly individualistic desires, achieving harmony on issues of the common plant such as repeaters, customer management of the different terminal equipments,” he said. “What if something goes wrong? What if the submarine amplifier on one fibre pair fails – will the other pair owners agree to interruption to repair the system. I expect the owners have had some interesting discussions.”
Meanwhile, there are industry suggestions that the Google-facilitated Unity project may now be extended to a “southern link” that would connect via Guam. SingTel and Pacnet are also likely starters in any such Southern project.
by Tony Chan
